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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE VALUE 
OF RELIGIOUS FACTS 

A STUDY OF SOME ASPECTS OF 
THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 



BY 

JAMES HAUGHTON WOODS 

Ph.D., Strassburg 



O* 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

31 West Twenty-third Street 
1899 






31309 



Copyright, 1899 

BY 

E. P. DUTTON & CO. 



Ube ftntcfecrbccfeec press, «ew 12orft 






IN REMEMBRANCE 
OF DAYS IN 
VALESCURE 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Materials i 

II. The Facts of Psychology . 19 

III. The Facts of History . . 86 

IV. The Values and the Standard, i 14 



The Value of Religious 
Facts 

CHAPTER I 

THE MATERIALS 

THE results of the science of religion 
have been confusing and contra- 
dictory, chiefly, perhaps, because the 
method and object of the researches 
have been different. One group of 
scholars has investigated what they 
deemed religion, meaning thereby the 
various cults, standards of life, and 
usages which have prevailed in the past, 
or prevail to-day, in greater or smaller 
communities. Such, for example, are 
Mr. Grant Allen's valuable descriptions 
i 



2 The Value of Religious Facts 

of sacred stakes, and of corpse worship. 
Another group, well represented by 
Biedermann, from the other extreme 
point of view, abstract the common 
elements of the psychological concep- 
tion of religion, and treat religion 
as the subjective attitude of persons 
who are members of a common social 
life. 

The method of the first is high in 
favor at the present day. Following in 
the way of the natural sciences its 
course seems clear ; the science of re- 
ligion is to build itself upon research 
and experiment. Its first task is to 
ascertain the common traits of those 
phenomena which are grouped under 
the term " religion." Nothing could be 
more simple. One forms by induction 
a general conception from definite 
cases and the result is a clear definition 
and a deeper insight. 



The Materials 3 

The second method is an inductive 
analysis and methodical rearrangement 
of that which distinguishes religion 
from the other facts of the inner life. 

How far may these two methods, 
the historical and the philosophical, be 
made to assist, and not to bewilder 
each other? In the labyrinth of the 
changing and the intricately interwoven 
religions of history can a common ele- 
ment with the subjective religious faith 
of to-day be found ? Is there one force 
which causes both ? Is there a normal 
religion with normal religious experi- 
ences and standards of living, and is 
there a normal religious faith ? 

To begin with the last question, the 
method is inductive, and the historical 
religions are the object of the experi- 
ment. 

If we try to understand a definite 
historical form of religion, for ex- 



4 The Value of Religious Facts 

ample the Egyptian religion, or the 
Christian religion in the form of the 
Greek Catholic Church, we turn to 
funeral inscriptions, ritual papyri, and 
to sculpture, or to catechisms, hymns, 
and books of devotion. Here is a 
mass of ideas in concrete form, a col- 
lection of definite statements about 
God, world, and men ; in addition, 
certain rules for will and deed toward 
God and men ; finally, in the ceremonies 
of worship, rules for certain deeds di- 
rectly to God alone. 

For contemporary religion this ma- 
terial is especially fertile because of its 
stability ; for religions of the past, with 
the exception of ritual survivals, we 
have scarcely any other authoritative 
material except in this written or artis- 
tic form. The confidence that one 
may really understand a religion from 
its authoritative books is increased by 



The Materials 5 

the fact that adherents of later develop- 
ments of the same or of allied religions 
use them in religious education. 

And still if we are in any true sense 
to understand historical religion, we 
cannot be satisfied with a complex of 
ideas or of rules, but must to some de- 
gree feel its subjective faith. A re- 
ligion lives as far only as it is felt by 
living subjects. If we speak with any 
accuracy of a religion like the Vedic, 
which has no surviving worshipper, 
whose sacred writings, however, lie 
before us, it is only because they help 
us to reconstruct for our imagination 
the emotions and the will-acts of the 
living men and women who ladled out 
the soma and preserved the sacred 
flame. The writings meant nothing to 
those persons except in so far as they 
aroused conviction of the truth of their 
teachings about life and man and the 



6 The Value of Religious Facts 

gods, so far as they subjected the wills 
in daily life and in sacred cults, and 
sustained a certain emotional tone. 
This mass of written rules and ideas 
was of course in use for the propaga- 
tion of the faith; but the immediate 
transference from one individual life to 
another within the religious communion 
of conviction, of expressions of willing 
obedience, of personal feelings, and of 
all varieties of mental habits, was a far 
more effective means of extending the 
faith. And this expression of deepest 
religious moods took place often in con- 
nection with the written tradition, far 
more often quite independently of it. 
Any research into a religion must find 
the value of these convictions of truth, 
these attitudes of will, these fluctuating 
shades of emotion. And the experi- 
ment will succeed only when the mo- 
tives for these states of mind are 



The Materials 7 

made clear to one's own self as a real, 
willing subject. 

The object of research, then, in any 
historical religion is, in the last analysis, 
the complex of peculiar phenomena of 
consciousness of the members of that 
particular religion. 

This launches us into incredible dif- 
ficulties. The multitude of objects is 
countless; the number of the different 
religions which exist or no longer exist 
is sufficiently large, but the peculiar 
psychic states of the members of these 
religions even when contemporary were 
by no means the same, and in the 
course of time passed through a series 
of crises. The prevailing moods and 
motives of a Christian of the fourth 
century were remote from one of the 
beginning of the second. 

Still the number of cases is not the 
difficulty so much as the methods of 



8 The Value of Religious Facts 

investigation. And this is the difficulty 
of all science of historical human life, 
especially of morals, of aesthetical 
habits, and of religion. 

What is the method of natural sci- 
ence ? Given objects are exactly 
arranged in relations of quantity and 
quality and in causal relations. Any 
other attitude than that of an unpre- 
judiced spectator who analyzes and 
measures, any attempt to penetrate 
into an inner meaning of the material, 
is unscientific and ridiculous. 

For the historian, however, the inner 
lives of men are not merely outer ob- 
jects, but an object that must in some 
degree be reconstructed out of his own 
personal feelings. The historian may 
actually experience the same feelings 
which the given historical persons felt, 
or he may imagine these feelings, and 
there is no necessity to live through 



The Materials 9 

the experience in order to understand. 
We can put ourselves at the point of 
view of the Mohammedan without be- 
coming Moslems. We construct within 
ourselves a hypothetical experience 
such as he would feel in the worship 
of Allah. This hypothetical worship 
may be described by analogy. 

Before a definite will-act committing 
us to a course of conduct, a period of 
deliberation occurs during which we 
construct for ourselves a hypothetical 
experience, and discover how we are 
likely to feel about it by experiencing 
in imagination the attitude we should 
take towards it. We anticipate re- 
actions of pleasure or of pain, as if 
the imagined experience were actually 
arousing the emotions and the feel- 
ings of effort which make up our self. 
Likewise we can live ourselves into the 
feelings of others, and especially into 



io The Value of Religious Facts 

such psychical states as have been 
active in men in history, in the form, 
it may be, of a religious life remote 
from our own. As a concrete ex- 
ample: we can place ourselves in a 
mood in which Apollo seems to be 
advancing to the twin heights of Par- 
nassus. The god of the golden hair is 
as clear to us as daylight, the embodi- 
ment of the brightness of the Greek 
atmosphere and of all that was bril- 
liant and joyous and lofty in the Greek 
mind. We love to dwell upon the 
thought. We enter into it. There are 
the laurel leaves upon the brow, the 
lyre, and the lips curling with scorn 
of all that is vulgar. We wonder, we 
give thanks, and, if we are only Greeks, 
we cry out that he will save us and 
guard our homes from woe, and be 
favorable to us, and crown our city 
with the honors of the games. 



The Materials 1 1 

This is hypothetical worship, lacking 
the conviction of the reality of what 
we have seen, lacking in impulses which 
govern our course of action, lacking in 
the kind of pleasure which experiences 
of reality bring home to ourselves. 

Have we, then, the means to recon- 
struct the religious situations of others 
as they themselves experienced them ? 
We have descriptions of ideas, especially 
conceptions of gods, we have descrip- 
tions of certain religious acts, and, less 
often, descriptions of the motives and 
the moods which accompany these 
ideas and acts. These last lie before 
us in all degrees of development, from 
the unconscious expressions of jubilant 
trust and gratitude in the Delphic 
hymns to Apollo to the intricate reflec- 
tion of the Psalms and of religious 
autobiographies. If we take simple 
concrete experiences with little or no 



12 The Value of Religious Facts 

analysis of feelings bound up with 
them, the mere mention of the facts 
arouses sympathetic impulses in us. 
We can successfully imagine the psy- 
chic condition of one who cries for de- 
liverance from marauders, from famine, 
from loss by fire or by death, of one 
who bursts out into thanks for bright 
skies, for harvests, for victory, for a 
just verdict against tyrants. Our im- 
agination feasts upon the details. The 
single images group themselves into a 
picture. Unconsciously we have taken 
attitude with the strange creatures 
whose lives are so distant from us. 
Similarly, passionate expressions of 
sadness or exultation, of indignation or 
hope, betray to us inner processes with 
which we are almost daily familiar. 
Out of our own life we vitalize the 
written record. 

But we are not limited to a slavish 



The Materials 13 

repetition of the experiences suggested 
in the texts. As we repeat in our- 
selves the scene of joy or of depression, 
and the feelings which are bound up 
with it, our own will-attitude crystal- 
lizes about the material, and we com- 
pare ours with that of the totemist 
or the bacchanal or the Buddhist, as 
the case may be. We try to decide 
whether this attitude which we have 
developed in ourselves adjusts itself to 
the other, whether there is any hint of it 
there, whether it is not necessary by in- 
ference to complete the gaps in the text. 
We assume that we are doing our ut- 
most to sympathize. When this is im- 
possible, we are obliged to interpolate 
our feelings in order to understand. 

This, then, is the task : to reproduce, 
as if real to us, all the ideas which 
compose the mental picture present to 
the stranger, to repeat in our own im- 



14 The Value of Religious Facts 

agination all the feelings or will-atti- 
tudes which were bound up with this 
experience. 

Out of all this attitude, a mood, 
made up of the trust, the hope, the in- 
dignation, and the gladness, or what- 
ever else, is formed. During the 
process we acquire a keen sense of 
difference between our own real atti- 
tude and that which we are trying to 
imitate. As the distinctions are be- 
coming clear to us, we ask half uncon- 
sciously whether this motive, this tone, 
is known to our individual religious life. 
In proportion as this comparison is 
searching, our own point of view will 
be much more definite and the other 
will begin to be understood. Real 
contrast with new material gives to 
ourselves a firmer poise and gives to it 
the freshness of life. 

Not for a moment is the need of dis- 



The Materials 15 

passionate historical research forgotten. 
This most exact work is indispensable. 
Without collection of traditions, edit- 
ing of texts, chronology, comparison 
of sources, any hope for a scientific re- 
sult is folly. But upon this material 
the method of imagined repetition of 
the experience must be built up, if any 
new religious insight is to be required. 
This has been accomplished in the most 
rigorous manner by Mr. Jevons, by 
Professor Oldenberg, Professor Tiele, 
and, earlier, by Robertson Smith. 
Progress in history of religion at the 
present is due not merely to the dis- 
covery of papyri and inscribed bricks 
and other masses of unexpected docu- 
ments, but quite as much to the newly 
acquired skill in imagining ourselves on 
the spot even with prehistoric savages. 
And this we owe very probably to the 
poets and the romantic school. 



1 6 The Value of Religious Facts 

The possibility of error is unavoid- 
able. First, in enlivening the histori- 
cal data we discover the limitations of 
our method. In the definition of phys- 
ical objects we have a right to expect 
a high degree of precision on account 
of the relative stability of the material ; 
in the description of psychical life, since 
our view of life is estranged from that 
of other men, especially those of an- 
cient time, security cannot be expected. 
Likewise, the interpolation of feeling 
into defective descriptions of religious 
life is hazardous by reason of the indi- 
vidual character of psychic life. A 
contradiction apparent to another may 
not be plain to me. In the same way, 
with regard to comparison of our own 
and other religious attitudes, the ten- 
dency to distinguish our own, or the 
tendency to discover resemblances to 
our own in countless other forms of 



The Materials 17 

worship may either be excessive, or 
our own attitude may change and our 
conception of other beliefs would also 
be in danger of change. 

There is, then, no absolute certainty 
that we can reproduce religious senti- 
ment. One may reduce the chances 
of error by approaching the subject 
from as many different sides as possi- 
ble, from many different moods, and 
with more perfect comprehension of 
the state of civilization, of the habits 
of life, and of the peculiar experiences 
of the given case. And gradually one 
may compare religions and discover in 
what degree they agree with one's own. 

Before, however, a discussion of this 
kind may be begun with any hope of 
a result, we must consider the whole 
question : whether we have any right to 
assume that religion is an independent 
activity, or merely a variation of some 



1 8 The Value of Religious Facts 

other form of human life ; whether it is 
different in kind, touching other activi- 
ties but never included in them, or, 
rather, a species of morals, or of art, or 
of logic, or of any other distinct prov- 
ince of life. This brings us very close, 
first, to the facts of psychology, and, 
later, to the facts of history. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FACTS OF PSYCHOLOGY 

THE very statement of the question, 
whether religion is a unique fact, 
in the closest connection with all the 
rest of human life, or subject to its 
own laws and relatively independent of 
all other departments of life, arouses 
numberless difficulties. 

There can be no doubt where the 
concentration of difficulties lies. As 
the whole argument has implied, the 
problem is one of the psychology of 
religion and of the history of religion. 
The first examines the existence, the 
origin, and the significance of religion 
in human consciousness. The latter 
19 



20 The Value of Religious Facts 

gives us the material and searches for 
the connection between the isolated 
historical facts. 

The task of religious psychology is 
no longer abstract and individual but 
historical and social. The field of view 
has widened enormously. The most 
heterogeneous and rudimentary re- 
ligious states, the least developed rites 
and social forms, are eagerly tested. 

The psychology of individual states, 
— of desire, of intention, of reflection, 
of resolve, of emotions of joy and grief, 
hope and expectation, of memory and 
of imagination ; of the relations be- 
tween states, such as attention and 
vividness of idea, reflection and feel- 
ing; and of the changes of personality 
and of abnormal states, — all this is cer- 
tainly of the greatest aid to religious 
psychology. But it is the psychology 
of the social life, — of the psychic proc- 



The Facts of Psychology 21 

esses of sympathy and aversion, envy, 
hatred, reverence, generosity, of friend- 
ship and trust, — which has a direct 
bearing. Just as there is a psychology 
of jurisprudence, of economics, of art, 
and of morals, so there is a psychology 
of religion. 

Such a psychology analyzes the given 
psychic conditions, and the result is 
clean-cut descriptions of how, for ex- 
ample, motives group with certain 
intentions, and certain emotions with 
certain ideas ; but an abstract construc- 
tion of a religion out of psychological 
elements is mythological. Good psy- 
chology may be made out of a religion, 
but no religion was ever patched to- 
gether out of discoveries of a labora- 
tory. 

If we strip off all metaphysics and all 
prejudice for or against and apply a 
rigorous psychological method to a re- 



22 The Value of Religious Facts 

ligious consciousness, the result of the 
analysis is the same for this as for any 
other psychical experience, — a mass 
of ideas bound up with feelings frorh 
which manifold voluntary impulses 
spring. An idea, however simple, is al- 
ways the starting-point, accompanied 
by feelings and ambitions which react 
upon the idea. The religions are com- 
plicated forms of these same elements. 
In all forms of real consciousness we 
find the simple sensations, with feelings 
of pleasure and pain, and will-attitudes, 
developing into countless complica- 
tions. From these elements the con- 
scious life is built. The sensations are 
connected in complex conceptions, the 
feelings and will-impulses develop into 
permanent dispositions and characters. 
Intellect and will, the ability to be 
aware of objects, and the ability to re- 
act upon these objects with feelings 



The Facts of Psychology 23 

and impulses, are, then, the elements of 
religion, and they are always found 
together. Religions are complicated 
forms of ideas with intricate emotions 
and volitions. The content of these 
ideas may be enormously different, and 
the emotions and volitions endless in 
variety. 

But there is a constant element. 
And this remains. This idea is always 
of superhuman realities to which rever- 
ence is due, and these ideas, accom- 
panied by powerful emotions, result in 
actions, in ceremonies, in social usages, 
or in morality. By traditions, by cus- 
tom, by expanding authority, this psy- 
chical complex rules groups of human 
beings and crystallizes in social organi- 
zations. 

The question naturally arises, whence 
is this idea and these accompanying 
states of mind ? A deeper knowledge 



24 The Value of Religious Facts 

of the inner structure of life is neces- 
sary, if one is to fix more definitely the 
seat of the religious experience. Not 
that there are faculties, or powers, or 
any such abstractions. It is the whole 
soul that is active, but active on differ- 
ent material and with different relations 
of the functions which combine into 
the attitude of will. 

In the first place, then, the religious 
experience is not the co-ordinating 
functions which are always more or less 
active, even, very probably, subcon- 
scious states. These activities are by 
no means the same as the actual con- 
tents of the soul. The most important 
of these are the logical connection of 
ideas, according to the laws of contra- 
diction and of sufficient reason, and 
the associative connection of ideas in 
memory and imagination. 

Logic arranges the given material, 



The Facts of Psychology 25 

but never produces the contents of 
consciousness. In all its forms the 
constant element is the strife for the 
feeling that certain contents belong 
together, the strife for consistency and 
unity. 

But since the material of logic is an 
exceedingly small section of the whole 
of reality, and since even this material 
is restless in movement and transforma- 
tion, the logical activity never comes 
to the complete whole and never comes 
to rest. 

In spite of this the struggle for unity 
persists. One who clings to isolated 
facts or to certain keen impressions 
without effort to compare them with 
other facts or feelings is condemned as 
a narrow thinker or a sentimentalist. 
Another, who will not face details, but 
rushes to conclusions for the sake of 
generalizations, is one-sidedly intellec- 



26 The Value of Religious Facts 

tual. Thought is productive when it 
is compelled to postulate a higher 
unity, not given directly in experience, 
which will include the single, isolated 
items of concrete life. These postu- 
lates are empirically verifiable or stand 
in permanent relation to some one of 
the great meanings of life. Thus the 
religious idea has often been analyzed 
as the result of a similar postulate, as 
the impulse to assume a single cause of 
reality. 

As a matter of fact, no known re- 
ligion has arisen in this manner. Re- 
ligion is what it is, not because it 
satisfies logical postulates, but because 
of its own peculiar value, and its close 
connection with all the ideal signifi- 
cance of reality, with the higher emo- 
tions, and with the sense of an infinite 
reality higher than what is human. 

All the geniuses of religious history 



The Facts of Psychology 27 

have troubled themselves precious lit- 
tle about unity and sufficient reason. 
They have lived in an immediate ex- 
perience, and in indifference to such 
problems. 

Naturally the religious idea, when 
once actually presented, satisfies the 
need of a cause, or promises a final 
satisfaction. But it is incredible that 
the bare idea of a cause could generate 
a great religion or could even furnish 
the germ of more than a temporary and 
provisional individual religious mood. 
Logical thinking is important enough 
for a conception of reality and for a 
conception of religious life, but it is 
never its origin. 

It is a law of associative memory that 
a feeling which has been aroused by a 
certain cause may call forth a similar 
or contrasted idea or one merely acci- 
dental connected with it, which it has 



28 The Value of Religious Facts 



as its occasion. Thirst recalls the idea 
of the last refreshing drink. An enor- 
mous part of the inner life runs on in 
this way, dreaming, hoping, or dreading 
— ideas which correspond to no reality. 
Religion has been explained as the 
idea of a force similar to, but more 
effective than, human powers, which 
can free us from evils, as one man 
helps another. The awakening of all 
varieties of feeling of the need of such 
a Power could only intensify and ex- 
tend the idea. 

This attempt at explanation which 
brings religion into the closest intimacy 
with the emotional life of man, and 
therefore nearer to his real self, is cer- 
tainly much less inaccurate than the 
previous attempt. 

All that need be stated here is, that 
the statements of all genuine religions 
about themselves completely contra- 



The Facts of Psychology 29 

diet this theory. Possibly in the most 
primitive forms it may be valid. But 
their origin eludes historical research. 
The question now is whether, accord- 
ing to those who speak of what they 
experience, religion is one of the im- 
mediate and most real contents of the 
inner life. 

Another explanation of religion by 
the laws of association deserves atten- 
tion. The imagination is not only the 
stream of all sorts of associated pres- 
entations, but also the expression of 
the ideal significance of experience to 
the will in certain perceptible impres- 
sions and forms. All human thinking, 
speaking, and acting is bound up with 
these sensuous forms, and in connec- 
tion with such forms only is there any 
experience at all. 

Thus the picture, which has served 
as a medium in which the meaning was 



o The Value of Religious Facts 



expressed, or which possesses some 
kind of affinity with the meaning, 
becomes the invariable implement to 
represent, to reawaken, or to com- 
municate these ideal experiences. 

Art and poetry, beside the aesthetic 
pleasure of their form, express ideal 
meaning which is otherwise inexpress- 
ible; and these forms become the 
mightiest means of the education of 
the will. The most abstract language 
of metaphysics betrays the childish 
metaphor of the primitive symbolic 
speech of the imagination. 

Likewise religion is bound up with 
images and media, which have some 
kind of analogy with the ideal religious 
experience, or suggest it to the inner 
life ; and these are so inextricably 
bound up with this inner experience 
that they become indispensable sym- 
bols of religious speech and imagina- 



The Facts of Psychology 31 

tions. Heaven, Creation, Light, Lord 
are poetical terms, but to a developed 
religious nature symbols of inner facts 
independent of any aesthetic insight. 

The religious idea, then, is not the 
result of these co-ordinating activities. 

The contents of the soul, in contrast 
to the activities which have the charac- 
ter of immediacy are of two classes: 
one of percepts and presentations, the 
other of an ideal world. 

The first, the world of visible, 
sounding, impenetrable bodily things 
which our senses present to us, the 
other, that which gives a significance 
and calm to the inner life, and to 
the outer world, forms, purposes, and 
values of beauty, of goodness, of truth 
and of holiness. The latter exist only 
in connection with the former in origin 
and result, but are clearly distinguish- 
able from it and independent of it. 



32 The Value of Religious Facts 

If we distinguish the contents of the 
soul into two different kinds of reality, 
we may distinguish the psychic activi- 
ties into perception and feeling. To- 
wards the outer world of objects the 
activity appears as perception and sen- 
suous emotion. On account of the 
constancy and clearness of the concep- 
tion, and on account of the lack of in- 
terest on the part of the deeper nature 
of the personality, the emotional reac- 
tion is insignificant, easily separated 
from the object, and diminishes to a 
mere care for accuracy of perception or 
even of total indifference. The object 
is comparatively separable from the 
real self. 

In the inner life of perceptions of 
ideal realities and of ideal feelings of 
values with the corresponding volun- 
tary impulses, the element separable 
from the subject is small. We have 



The Facts of Psychology 33 

here to do not with a world, incompre- 
hensible, easily detached from the self, 
foreign to the innermost nature, but 
with a world affirming itself, immedi- 
ately perceptible, comprising all that 
gives meaning and consistency to life. 
Hence we find these values, in spite 
of their universality and necessity, 
everywhere in the closest relation to 
the individual person, in the most 
deeply rooted intimacy with the pas- 
sions, in dependence upon the will, 
which gathers itself together and 
moulds itself, and subjects itself to 
their ideal authority, if they are per- 
manently to master the character dis- 
tracted in the ever-varying world of 
the senses. Hence the indistinctness 
and dissimilarity of the ideal values in 
comparison with the distinctness and 
similarity of the sensuous perceptions. 

The connection of this knowledge 
3 



34 The Value of Religious Facts 

of ideals with the will which subjects 
itself to moral commands has the 
further consequence that its higher 
forms can grow only with the moral 
development of the race and with the 
gradual moral gain of individuals. The 
perception of the sensuous world, on 
the contrary, is always, at least in 
principle, the same. The concept of 
the tree permits a far less degree of de- 
velopment than the idea of truth or of 
love. 

Therefore the attempt has been 
made by some apologists of the ideal 
world to denote this more definite and 
stable mass of perceptions as the prac- 
tical side of life or as the world of 
judgments of value, and as such to 
separate it from the world of ideals. 
But thereby the false assumption is 
made that practical perceptions of 
value need not be related to an ideal, 



The Facts of Psychology 35 

and that this world of ideals may be 
arbitrarily secluded. On the contrary, 
any attempt at a standard demands 
that different concrete cases find their 
right relation to each other and to the 
other facts of reality. As a matter of 
fact, it is true, these different indi- 
vidual cases of judgment, since they 
belong to different levels in the scale, 
are often in violent conflict with each 
other, and likewise with the more or 
less accurate knowledge of the facts of 
history or of nature. But the differ- 
ence between the different kinds of 
knowledge is of importance. In the 
purely sensuous sphere mental pres- 
entations may be almost completely 
severed from their emotional accom- 
paniment; they rest their evidence 
upon their constancy and clearness 
apart from any subjective feeling. But 
ideals may never be severed from 



o 



6 The Value of Religious Facts 



accompanying feelings of value and 
stimulations of the will, and they base 
their evidence not upon their mere 
presence in the mind, but, far more, 
upon their power upon the inner life, a 
power to which one must subject one's 
self unless the germs of the ideal are to 
wither away. 

Their indispensability for the practi- 
cal life and their positive effect upon 
the whole mental life are a part of their 
evidence, and the basis for the measure- 
ment of their value. Certainty for the 
reality of the sensuous world is easy to 
attain in comparison with the certainty 
for the reality of the ideal worth which 
must be slowly wrought out in personal 
experience. 

But, in the first case, we have to do 
with a kind of reality foreign to us, and 
impenetrable; in the other with one 
immediately comprehensible to one's 



The Facts of Psychology 37 

own life. The question of the relation 
of these two forms of reality to the 
total reality, of the relation of the two 
to each other, and of the relation of 
the laws of causality in the first to the 
ideal motivation of the will, all lead us 
astray from the issue, which is, — that 
religion, in accordance with its own 
testimony, takes its place in the second, 
the ideal, and non-sensuous world, and 
shows all the peculiarities of this kind 
of knowledge. Like ethics, logic, and 
aesthetics, science of religion deals with 
the ideal life as its material. 

But the chief difficulty is to distin- 
guish the religious intuition from the 
moral and the aesthetic. These two 
depend upon rules and laws, which are 
immanent as such in the mind in their 
human form. But religion, at least 
religion of daily life, depends upon 
something distinct from a mental habit 



38 The Value of Religious Facts 

of action, upon something complete in 
itself and " personal," which is above 
the individual, and the laws of which 
are merely modes of its own activity. 

It is clear that such a belief arouses 
difficulties which do not beset the be- 
lief in the existence of such rules, or 
the belief which limits knowledge to 
the concrete and immediate experi- 
ence. Moral and aesthetic laws may be 
recognized, fragmentarily at least, in 
actual control of reality and be felt as 
part of the very nature of the inner 
life ; the religious principle is never 
expressed as such in the reality and is 
usually dressed in such fantastic forms 
that it often can scarcely be felt as a 
simple fact of the soul's life. 

The moral and logical in some shape 
are deeply rooted in the very nature of 
human minds, whether in actual con- 
trol or not; to these the individual is 



The Facts of Psychology 39 

indifferent. The religious is a personal 
relation, felt in his own way by each. 
The former may be thought as infinite 
and superhuman, or as belonging to the 
nature of the human mind ; the latter 
seems at every attempt to insist upon 
its infinity, to be involved in contradic- 
tions and to have entered into men by 
some kind of sorcery. 

But throughout, religion insists upon 
its own right to live, in spite of meta- 
physical entanglements. The conse- 
quence is that religion is diminished to 
a belief in moral or aesthetic laws. 

The religious belief in an infinite and 
ideal significance of reality is inter- 
preted as having its germ in the experi- 
ence of these laws. Plenty of the most 
recent idealists, most distinctly Rau- 
wenhoff, and even Wundt, tend to 
this point of view. As such men be- 
lieve, elements of truth in the actual 



4-0 The Value of Religious Facts 

religions ought to develop into the 
normal religion. The explanation of 
the origin of the historical religions 
would be that man has heretofore been 
bound to natural sensuous likenesses 
and pictures to express the ideal mean- 
ing of the world ; and that he has been 
able to grasp the unity of mind in the 
anthropomorphic or conceptual form 
only. The primitive, and even the 
world religions, have their basis in a 
certain crudeness and sensuousness of 
conception; they express inadequately 
in the individual the content of the 
one mind. 

This explanation certainly explains 
a part only of the whole case. The 
religions certainly contain more than a 
sensualizing of the ideal reason. They 
cling to the idea of a Being who is 
not coterminous with human being. 
They insist that there is communion 



The Facts of Psychology 41 

with an ideal world, that an elevation 
of the finite human life is possible only 
when such an ideal world is accessible 
to the prayers, the hopes, and the 
efforts of men. 

Another form of this same explana- 
tion is practical : man needs to express 
the ideal meaning of his life, in fact, 
all significance and purpose in his life, 
not in dead, abstract laws, but as living 
personal powers who themselves guar- 
antee that life has a meaning, who are 
able to overcome the painful discrep- 
ancy between the conditions of the in- 
dividual and his ideal, who are willing 
to protect him in the struggle of life and 
from the brutality of nature. Hence 
gods are the personified ideals of the 
human mind. 

These explanations abolish the specif- 
ically religious, and substitute a belief 
in the ideal order of the world, a belief 



42 The Value of Religious Facts 

only, since the ideal order is never 
known to be in full control of reality. 
This belief certainly has close relation- 
ship with religious faith, but only when 
this order actually rules men and the 
world about them, and becomes the 
supreme law and the significance of 
the total reality of which man is a 
mere fragment. 

If this is so, this point of view is 
scarcely more than an extremely at- 
tenuated religion. It is impossible to 
conceive of an all-embracing thought 
without a thinking subject. As a mat- 
ter of fact, all that is here accomplished 
is for logical reasons to put an end to 
the contradictions of the ordinary theis- 
tic conception of God ; but the religious 
impulse restores the moral and aesthetic 
orders, in so far as they control life, to 
a position where in some way they con- 
tinue independent of itself, dominat- 



The Facts of Psychology 43 

ing it, existing for themselves, even if 
not anthropomorphically imaged ; and 
nothing restrains us from lifting up 
ourselves into the presence of this 
Supreme Life with longings and hopes, 
with humility and admiration, although 
no express petition be put into words. 

This makes it plain that the belief in 
the existence of these laws is intimately 
related to religious faith and rooted in 
it, but that this faith always contains 
a supplement to these. And this is 
the relation to an infinite Power, or, 
from a human scale, endless Power. In 
dependence upon this Power lies the 
practical character of religion as a 
ceaseless effort to attain the highest 
good from it. 

That religion is different from such 
a moral or aesthetic faith becomes clear 
in view of the fact that any lasting 
connection between them is not to be 



44 The Value of Religious Facts 

found except in the highest levels of 
the great religions. 

In the lower religions religious faith 
is neutral with regard to both. No 
analysis discovers in these religions a 
permanent relation to the good or 
beautiful, or, when present, they are 
never characteristic of the faith. There 
is, however, constantly present a rela- 
tion to a higher Power, in whose hands 
lies safety or destruction, to whose life 
our feeble life is bound. 

The result then is that religion, as a 
matter of fact, is always more than an 
experience of ideal laws, and that it 
constantly maintains its relation to a 
superhuman form of being in whom the 
meaning and the fate of our life lies. 

Is this assertion one worthy of belief 
or is it a self-deception ? In case re- 
ligious faith is held to be a form of 
belief in the ideal reason of an absolute 



The Facts of Psychology 45 

consciousness, the explanation that re- 
ligion is an illusion could not be given. 
But when this faith is reduced to the 
conviction that the highest ideals of the 
human race exist in men only, then, cer- 
tainly, religion must be explained as 
illusion. The ideal world must be ex- 
plained as a product of the mind, which 
grows up out of its experience, and the 
ideal must be reduced to the trust in a 
collective welfare which guarantees the 
welfare of the individual. Religion, the 
belief in a power which contains these 
ideals in itself, which makes them effec- 
tive in the world of men, which thereby 
cares for men, is from this point of view 
an illusion. And the explanation of this 
illusion lies in the characteristic mark 
of religion, the belief in higher powers 
and in the hope of help from them. 
Just that which men have sought for 
themselves and ought to work out for 



4.6 The Value of Religious Facts 

themselves, religion assumes to be the 
reality controlling the world, a power 
accessible to men. The inextinguish- 
able desire for the realization of human 
purposes is the origin of the religious 
idea, with all that it includes, and the 
difference between religions is ex- 
plained as the difference between hu- 
man needs and ideals. The religious 
idea would then be a complex of prim- 
itive theories of nature and of im- 
aginary ideals stimulated by feelings 
of dissatisfaction and pain. 

This theory certainly touches the 
nerve of religions, their practical char- 
acter. Whoever has felt the force of 
the difficulties with regard to the con- 
ception of God, and its clash with the 
brutal facts of actual life, will be at- 
tracted to it. 

But how deep its implications cut. 
The whole psychology of religion is 



The Facts of Psychology 47 

reversed. The religious idea becomes 
the result of violent emotions and 
causal inferences, instead of the source 
of the highest human hopes and intui- 
tions. Any one capable of reflection 
must require very cogent reasons for 
such a reversal. No serious thinker, 
however, maintains that religion has 
its origin in wishes exclusively. A 
purely arbitrarily wished form would 
last but a short time. There must 
have been the idea of a power to which 
the cravings and desires could attach 
themselves. 

Such an idea is said to have been the 
personified animistic or mythological 
view of nature, or the worship of ghosts 
and of ancestors. But nothing very 
definite can be said about these origins ; 
no concrete cases are cited. Still, 
whatever the origin may have been, 
we have, it is asserted, in this un- 



48 The Value of Religious Facts 

conscious personification, the idea, to 
which the religions need has attached 
itself, and we have in these crude ideas 
the beginning of the development of 
the traditional belief in God. 

But these primitive ideas have long 
since vanished before a more exact 
knowledge of nature, or, at least, in 
the higher religions, become insignifi- 
cant. If now religion, in spite of this 
destruction of its object, has endured, 
the reason can be this only, that in the 
growth of religion, the peculiar causal 
thinking which constructs these ideas 
continues, or the emotions and satis- 
factions which were caused by the 
primitive religious idea, have led to 
unconscious transformations of the 
idea of the gods. 

The first, the explanation by causal 
thinking, is not in accordance with the 
facts; or, if it does occur, it is only 



The Facts of Psychology 49 

secondarily so. Usually it occurs as a 
proof of what already exists. 

The second, the explanation by trans- 
formation of the idea, must then be the 
case. Religion would owe its main- 
tenance, if not its origin, to feelings of 
need. The needs would cling to the 
traditional objective religious forms; 
and these would adapt themselves to 
change of circumstance. But is even 
this explanation probable ? 

The actual influence of the idea of 
God, apart from its influence upon a 
few philosophers and more or less 
isolated individuals, is very solid, and 
can scarcely be explained to-day as a 
mere after-effect of animistic thinking 
and of the restoration or transforma- 
tion of what remains of this thinking 
by vigorous wishes. 

Is it not simpler to assume that in 

the beginning of religious ideas some- 

4 



50 The Value of Religious Facts 

thing more came into play than the 
bare childishness of the primitive view 
of nature, and that this other, with the 
same involuntary necessity, is still effec- 
tive in religious ideas ? Or else to 
meet the theory half way, by admitting 
in all religious ideas a permanent and 
ever intensifying element which would 
be the involuntary assumption of some 
kind of a causal power ? Would there 
not be in the religious idea an irre- 
ducible ideal of a Will which is not 
the result of judgments, but the cause 
of them ? 

But if one does not insist that these 
needs have produced the belief in God, 
but that they have preserved it and 
deepened it, then the emphasis upon 
this practical side of religion is no 
longer decisive. 

The needs are universal and inexter- 
minable. They are rooted fast in the 



The Facts of Psychology 51 

ideal character of the inner life, which 
craves something more than quench- 
ing of thirst or of hunger, than protec- 
tion from storms and foes, something 
authoritative and superhuman which 
gives a meaning to life and to the 
whole world, something which will 
satisfy the ideals. 

The satisfaction of these needs by 
religion has therefore been always one 
of the chief arguments of the adherents 
of all religions. And they have in- 
sisted that all the varied impediments 
caused by religion, its intolerance, its 
inertia, its hostility to change, are not 
necessarily connected with it. Cer- 
tainly the same objections could be 
made against the state and against 
law. Even by men who waste little 
sympathy upon traditional beliefs, it is 
keenly felt that the empirical reality 
with no religious postulates at all must 



52 The Value of Religious Facts 

be supplemented in order to be worthy 
of the best that is in men. 

There can be no doubt of the useful- 
ness of religion to give authority to 
morals, to refine social custom and ed- 
ucation, to give certainty to the indi- 
vidual of the significance and purpose 
of human effort. This is the minimum 
dilution of religion. But in its com- 
pleted form even this theory postulates 
that this world which we know is en- 
compassed in a higher power, which 
makes the attainment of higher pur- 
poses possible. 

Is not then so general, so ineradic- 
able a need which is so closely bound 
up with the most personal feelings of 
men something normal, and are not 
the ideals in which it finds content- 
ment just as near to the true nature of 
things as these needs stand to the per- 
manent character of the human will ? 



The Facts of Psychology 53 

In fine, can it be provisional and tem- 
porary wishes upon which so tenacious 
and so constantly renewed a fact as re- 
ligion rests ? If, however, these needs 
are necessary demands of human na- 
ture, then they are rather the way to 
truth than the way to illusion, unless 
we conclude that, on the whole, the 
world seems to us hopelessly rudimen- 
tary and without real meaning. 

This theory of postulates from the 
sense of need is not without weaknesses. 
Thereby we should be forced out of 
the deepest impulses of our nature to 
form the idea of a normal Being bear- 
ing all in himself, who has all the attri- 
butes which can be revealed directly 
or indirectly to the finite being, and 
yet who deems it better to allow him- 
self to be postulated, so that men never 
have to do with himself but always 
with an idea which they have con- 



54 The Value of Religious Facts 

structed about him. Is not this the 
natural inference of any one who takes 
this theory in earnest ? And can it 
then seem other than one-sided and 
limited in range ? 

The point at issue has really been 
forgotten : are the religious needs 
really such as arise as interpretations 
of historical and natural facts, and are 
they capable of making and refining 
the belief in superhuman powers to a 
religious faith, and are these religious 
needs, in their inmost core, parts of the 
actual situation of things, of the bare 
strife with nature, or of the mere for- 
mations of social life ? Or, on the 
other hand, are there not needs of 
something that one must have first 
experienced in order to feel the need ; 
are they not perhaps fixed in some kind 
of an experience of an object which 
first awakens the thought of a final and 



The Facts of Psychology 55 

infinite meaning of existence, which, in 
the struggle with the resisting impulses 
of greed, of sensuality, and of wilful- 
ness, attracts with constantly new pow- 
ers the better part of the human will 
to itself ? 

In such a case one does not think of 
amulets or of barbaric rites and formu- 
las of sorcery, of weather-makers, sooth- 
sayers, and fetish dealers; one knows 
too well that they belong more or less 
to the pathological cases of religion, 
and that they give us scarcely a glimpse 
of what occurs within the devotees. 

Rather one thinks first of the awak- 
ening of one's own religious life, and 
of those ideal moods and dispositions 
which one knows in persons and in the 
literature of to-day. What we seek is 
above all a basis for our existence, that 
we should not be alone in the brutal 
chaos of nature, a certainty of the sig- 



56 The Value of Religious Facts 

nificance of our own life and of the life 
of society, an intimacy with the Source 
of all life, in whom the cravings which 
are not satisfied in this present state of 
things will come to rest. 

Where faith in such a Power exists, 
all of our most highly developed life 
with its wishes and needs, its strains 
and flaws, is brought into a new rela- 
tion. And every energetic faith stands 
in a certain suspicious, or even hostile, 
attitude towards the actual civilization 
of its day, not so much because it de- 
spairs of its own power to realize its 
purposes in the life about it, but be- 
cause it wishes something altogether 
different and higher. Thus in the 
analysis of the religious need we find 
constantly something objective from 
which it proceeds. And this is con- 
firmed in other ways. 

The religious need is satisfied by the 



The Facts of Psychology 57 

idea of the Power which is capable of 
stilling the desire. This idea, whether 
imaginary or not, must be taken from 
experience, and it must be after the 
likeness of man. 

Now all religions, into whose real 
belief we succeed in getting a glimpse, 
have in this idea of a Power, which is 
similar in more or less degree to human 
nature, the intuition or a definite state- 
ment of an indefinitely higher, an in- 
finite, an unconditioned, or of even an 
absolute, will. 

This notion is certainly not taken 
from the reality of ordinary experience 
and adjusted to our desires, rather it is 
an involuntary fact of consciousness, 
which is experienced under certain cir- 
cumstances only. John Stuart Mill 
carefully neglected this factor in the 
conception of God and occupied him- 
self with the anthropomorphic idea of 



58 The Value of Religious Facts 

the common supernatural theology, 
which found a characteristic expression 
in such a man as Paley. 

Since this idea was not to be found 
in experience, it was to him as if it 
were illusory. He admitted its practi- 
cal value, but how such an idea ever 
arose, and from what it was developed, 
he does not make so clear. 

Another confirmation of the objec- 
tive character of the idea apart from 
its usefulness is, that religious feeling is 
never exhausted in the pleasure at the 
satisfaction of needs which are hoped 
for on account of the idea of God. The 
gods are by no means merely the be- 
stowers of what men crave. 

The feeling of fear, especially in the 
lower religions, is often more intense 
than hope, and in the higher religions 
reverence is stronger than aspiration. 
This fact is far from being a refutation 



The Facts of Psychology 59 

of the theory of illusion, but it is a 
refutation of the theory that the gods 
are the products of human wishes, and 
a proof that an independent and dur- 
able idea of superhuman powers existed 
before the religious wishes. 

Feuerbach, in his Wesen dcr Religion, 
went so far as to seek for what is 
objective in religion in the terrifying 
impressions and the great powers of 
nature. Herein was to be found the 
belief in superhuman powers,and the re- 
ligious wish came into play in the 
form that it sought protection from 
the whims and the ill-will and anger 
of the gods, until the gods of terror 
became transformed into friendly ful- 
filled of human desire. 

To-day the idea of divine powers is 
recognized not in these frightful and 
capricious shapes, but as the meeting- 
point of all human needs and longings. 



60 The Value of Religious Facts 

And the emotion is not terror but 
reverence and devotion. 

This change would not have oc- 
curred, if mere fear of imaginary spirits 
had generated all the forms of religion. 
There must have been something in 
the dread of ghosts which went beyond 
the idea of them and proved capable of 
assuming other forms. 

Feuerbach admits this and explains 
it thus: reverence is the involuntary 
poetical personification of the totality 
of nature, which causes all our joy and 
all our pain. But is this much more 
than the concept of an indefinite will, 
toned down to the maximum of feeble- 
ness, but not explained or connected ? 

And, after all, is it not just this 
which, in this form of the total connec- 
tion, continues to be a stimulant of 
religious feelings and characters ? 

All these variations of the theory of 



The Facts of Psychology 61 

illusion fail to be consistent with them- 
selves. There always remains some 
kind of a more or less vague idea of 
powers to which emotions of fear and 
attempts to expel the fear attach them- 
selves. Without these ideas the re- 
ligious wish would not have endured. 
Some half-conscious idea of a control- 
ling, connecting power gave the support 
to the hopes and the petitions. 

Therefore some involuntary idea 
must be presupposed to explain the 
facts of religion. An idea formed by 
a mere wish, once fixed in the religious 
worship of animists, could never have 
maintained itself. 

This involuntary formation of the 
idea, with its emotional and voluntary 
accompaniments is the basis for Zeller's 
theory. Religion is explained as being 
of both factors: of ideas of final causes, 
and of the needs and longings of the 



62 The Value of Religious Facts 

human heart. The first finds color and 
power in the second, and the latter 
a starting-point and support in the 
former. 

Both are so deeply rooted in human 
nature that there can be no illusion 
with regard to them, rather a constant 
deepening and purification, which strips 
off the imperfections of the original 
forms. This theory returns to the be- 
lief in the truth of religions. 

But it clings to a conclusion which 
attempts to explain religion as a pro- 
duct by men, who are asserted to have 
built it up by postulates and inferences 
about the ordinary realities. 

The formation of religious ideas is 
originally the crude, half-conscious 
causal thought, which expresses itself 
first in personification of natural phe- 
nomena and later in animism and spirit- 
ism. Gradually this process reaches 



The Facts of Psychology 6 



o 



the conception of incorporeal active 
powers, and lastly the idea of one 
Energy which governs all mental and 
material existence. 

With these ideas the crude and ex- 
ternal feelings of fear and hope and 
the corresponding ritual connect them- 
selves; then the satisfaction of more 
refined needs and of moral commands; 
finally the exquisite emotion of being 
in harmony with the One Will and of 
living in dependence upon Him. 

The first of these, the idea, arises 
out of a thoroughly correct habit of 
thought; the second, the emotion, is 
the demand of the deepest requirement 
of life ; both, therefore, are an increas- 
ing approximation to truth, but, at the 
same time, both are purely human pro- 
ducts, an elaboration of experience, at 
first barbaric, finally of the highest and 
purest quality. 



64 The Value of Religious Facts 

But in this theory of Zeller the in- 
voluntary character of the formation of 
the idea is far from being recognized. 
The historical instance before him must 
be that of the monotheism of Greek 
philosophy. This rests upon reflec- 
tion, like the theism of contemporary 
philosophy. But all the long de- 
velopment which precedes this mono- 
theism, the personification of nature, 
the worship of spirits, the refinement 
of the idea of the gods, is involuntary, 
without reflection, and is yet real re- 
ligion. The first, if not the only, 
monotheism which succeeded in be- 
coming the religion of a whole people 
is that of the prophets of Israel, and 
it won its place not by causal reflection, 
but by the impression of the eternity 
of the moral law. 

It is not so easy to explain how the 
statement of believers that their rela- 



The Facts of Psychology 65 

tion to God is direct and real is a de- 
ception. The insistence upon any one 
momentary form or the reference to 
some traditional revelation by writing 
certainly may be a case of deception. 
But against the experiences of a whole 
people it is not so easily maintained. 
Similar self-deceptions, such as the 
ancient theory of the course of the 
sun, is another kind of experience. 

Further, this involuntary nature of 
the belief in divine beings is not due 
to the fact that the reflection is subcon- 
scious, but to the fact that the object 
of reflection exists before the judgment 
is made, in the form of an intuition of, 
or an impulse to, superhuman beings 
before its connection with definite 
ideas. In this case thought is not pro- 
ductive. It mediates between an in- 
tuition and the reality, it connects one 
fact without another fact. 



66 The Value of Religious Facts 

This involuntary process may be ex- 
plained in one way only, when one 
assumes that the ideal perception or 
experience is the ground for the forma- 
tion of religious ideas. That would 
correspond with the persistent assertion 
of religion, which, indeed, in the deep- 
est fervor of the desire for deliverance 
awaits the fulfilment of its desire in 
the future, but never fails to insist that 
its experience of the divine, such as it 
is, is immediate. That would corre- 
spond with the fact that religion arises 
through the medium of a tradition, 
which, however, becomes faith, not by 
impetuous petitions and desire, but 
only by a peculiar inner experience. 
Thus the great facts of all kinds of 
mysticism, the limitation of the relig- 
ious process to itself, in isolation from 
all clear effect upon thought, emotions, 
or voluntary acts, would be explained. 



The Facts of Psychology 67 

Just as in interrelation with the 
world of the perceptive organism the 
picture of the world of the senses arises 
by an involuntary activity of the soul, 
so in the same way in interrelation 
with the same non-ego the experience 
of God as the inner nature or as the 
meaning of this world arises also by an 
involuntary activity. 

And both occur at the same time in 
each other, the experience of God in 
the sensible world, and the sensible 
world in an experience of God. The 
same world appears to us twice in 
different ways. The difference is 
great. 

Our attention with regard to the 
world of the senses wavers in very high 
degree, but our devotion to the experi- 
ence of God depends upon far more 
exacting conditions. It is conditioned 
upon the concentration of attention, 



68 The Value of Religious Facts 

which withdraws from the chaos of the 
world of the senses and their demands 
into itself; it is conditioned by the de- 
votion of the will, which subjects itself 
gradually to the indwelling ideal con- 
straint ; it is conditioned by the need 
of constant repetition, until from very 
slight beginnings full control over the 
emotional life is attained. 

Thus it would become clear why the 
need of finding the meaning of life in 
God requires the repetition of the re- 
ligious experience. Thus it becomes 
plain how reflection may attach itself 
to the experience and interweave with 
it cruder or sublimer aims of life. 

Religion rests then upon experience, 
partly of the divinity which encom- 
passes our life, and partly in the reac- 
tion of the soul towards the progress of 
other wills; therein it attains new in- 
sight into the divine life but in com- 



The Facts of Psychology 69 

bination with all the flaws and imperfect 
experiences. 

Religion then would spring from 
revelation, in the sense of an inner 
experience, such as the experience 
of the good or the true or the beau- 
tiful. 

This hypothesis explains the facts of 
religion ; theories of illusion explain 
less facts ; the facts of permanence and 
universality, but not the psychological 
and historical details. 

The result is then that we arrive at 
the conception of a very indefinite ex- 
perience of God, which is far from the 
concrete clearness of the historical re- 
ality to this extent, but the religious 
experience in its actual character is 
also far from precise, and describable 
in no direct conceptual form. 

The definiteness is an after-effect of 
the medium in which the experience 



/O The Value of Religious Facts 

arises, and fixes itself in the memory 
which easily separates from the inner 
religious occurrence itself. 

We still need then an explanation of 
these definite religious ideas in which 
religion fastens itself. This becomes 
easier in proportion as we bear in mind 
that the contemplation of God never 
occurs by itself, but always through 
the medium of the reality which closes 
in around us and is actually effective 
upon us. 

It fulfils itself for us chiefly through 
the medium of the traditional concep- 
tion of God, but beside this there are 
numberless things and events which 
awaken in secondary degree religious 
emotion. Hence for each person there 
is a peculiarly individual hue to his 
own contemplation. 

Where there is no conception in rigid 
tradition or one not yet in its full 



The Facts of Psychology 71 

growth, the secondary elements assert 
themselves. In memory the contem- 
plation and the whole associated ex- 
perience binds itself into the medium 
in which it arose. 

Hence the countless number of con- 
ceptual descriptions and recollections 
of God, among them an endless num- 
ber of provisional forms, which are 
temporary expressions ; others, because 
of their effectiveness upon life or the 
depth of their emotional value, become 
enduring interpretations of the religious 
life. 

In the case of Christianity the per- 
sonality of Christ is the permanent 
medium. Other descriptions are added 
from the fact that the content of the 
religious experience, inexpressible in 
itself, becomes more sharply defined 
by use of analogies of human life or of 
the life of nature, which have some 



72 The Value of Religious Facts 

affinity with what passes within the 
inner life. 

Whatever, then, may serve is given 
the task as a stimulus or as a medium 
of expression and thus may become a 
lasting symbol of the vision of God. 

All conceivable aspects then, of sky 
and earth, of mountain range and 
meadow, of stream and ocean, of 
plant and animal life; all events of 
human life, birth and death, dream 
and clairvoyance, great rulers and de- 
parted ancestry, danger and illness, all 
true or false interpretation of forces, 
laws, and positions in the universe ; all 
experiences of the beautiful and of the 
moral law, affect the religious life and 
become the bearers of the religious 
idea. 

It is the symbolizing imagination 
which plays this great role. Its paltry 
or majestic, intricate or clear, barbar- 



The Facts of Psychology j$ 

ous or sublime images bind the imagin- 
ation to the vision of God. One more 
compact set of ideas, usually given by 
tradition, acts as a nucleus and gives 
the direction. Thus, at a certain 
height of the religious development, it 
is often the great divinities of the 
heavenly lights which are the centre 
of the images of the religious imagin- 
ation. 

Religious life without imagination is 
unknown. Reflection, in the form of 
theology, is the herbarium of dried 
specimens of religious ideas. Great 
religious geniuses ignore such collect- 
ing. Living religion makes its effects 
in all the varieties of imaginary forms. 

The most powerful and the pur- 
est stimulants of the imagination are 
the conscience and moral judgments. 
Where morality differentiates itself to 
an independent knowledge of obliga- 



74 The Value of Religious Facts 

tion, it becomes its preeminent medium 
of expression. The tendency to an 
absolute standard in morality and the 
tendency to an absolute standard in 
religion draw the final purposes of 
both towards each other, and the social 
good of experience is transformed into 
the communion of the soul with the 
Source of Right. 

Likewise with the aesthetic judg- 
ments, but in a far less number of in- 
dividual lines, never perhaps to such 
an extent as among the Ionians. 

It is, then, the whole complicated 
human life, eluding definition, which 
gives expression to the religious idea. 
And we may assert that what we feel 
as religion must, in some way, have 
been at the core of the, now incom- 
prehensible, forms of even savage 
faiths. 

In the most ancient religion, or in 



The Facts of Psychology 75 

the works of the great ethnologists, 
traces of an ideal faith are never lack- 
ing. These traces are by no means 
moral only. Morality is one element 
only in the religious idea. There is 
nothing that may not be a religious 
symbol. The lower the religion, the 
more inconstant and inconsistent the 
symbols. The higher the religion, 
the more compactly all are grouped 
about the moral life and bound up 
with great personalities ; and tradition 
becomes solidified and less fluctuating. 
This whole world of the imagination 
need never construct a sharp concep- 
tion of God. It may produce the 
sense of an indefinitely sublime Being 
bound up with symbols and images; 
and it may desire nothing more than 
clearness and force in these expressions 
of the imagination. But the practical 
needs of the rites, the prayers, and the 



j6 The Value of Religious Facts 

usages which attach to them take more 
rigid shapes and often become trans- 
mitters of the tradition. The very 
highest religions alone feel the lack of 
a conceptual order of thought and 
thereby enter into the most compli- 
cated varieties of the religious life. 

Obviously the awakening of the re- 
ligious feeling is not simply individual, 
aroused in each by new media of ex- 
pression. In a great majority of cases 
the individual experience is the belief 
in a traditional vision of God passed on 
through a long series of intermediary 
persons. It is reproductive far more 
often than original. 

In productive cases a new overpower- 
ing knowledge of God in new means of 
expression creates a fresh symbol from 
other analogies and attracts a new set 
of believers. In lower religions, where 
the religious emotion is shallow and 



The Facts of Psychology jy 

easily stimulated from all sides, far 
more waverings and inequalities of the 
idea prevail, and the bond of social life 
is rather the family or political life than 
the strength of the religious life. End- 
less variations in tradition and custom 
which unite the group occur, most 
naturally, by reason of the simplicity 
of the religious ideas. But in the 
higher religions which are more firmly 
bound to great regulative principles, 
which can be assimilated by great effort 
only, comparatively little leeway is left 
for the independence of the individual. 

And the religions which trace their 
source to definite personalities evi- 
dently demand much too great devo- 
tion to the ideals which proceed from 
them to leave much superfluous energy 
for individual initiative. 

Hence the much emphasized social 
character of the highest religions hav- 



78 The Value of Religious Facts 

ing its ground not merely in the gen- 
eral social impulse, which concentrates 
itself in rites, but chiefly in the vanish- 
ing power of the single person in pro- 
portion to the height of the religion. 
The higher the religion, the greater the 
demand upon the self-devotion of the 
individual and the less his ability to 
produce. In this way the bonds of the 
religious communions become more 
firm and durable than any motive to 
the formation of other social groups. 

The essence of the religious ideas is 
that men live in the belief in the reality 
of superhuman power. 

In this belief is fixed an intense emo- 
tional impression which becomes con- 
trolling in practical life. The feeling 
results from the very nature of the re- 
ligious idea; since the experience of a 
power governing one's own life and the 
whole of nature must excite all kinds 



The Facts of Psychology 79 

of emotions of hope or anxiety for one's 
own fate and the fate of one's people. 

Further than this the experience 
passes over into a peculiarly religious 
emotion, the awful realization of an 
unfathomable, half-revealed mystery. 
The charm of this mystery is felt even 
in the most savage religions. It is 
something that passes beyond the 
chaffering with values of pleasure and 
pain. 

It plays between the tones of dread 
and confidence, and vibrates between 
endless half-tones. Respect, rever- 
ence, fear, renunciation, terror, and 
admiration, gladness, trust, love, and 
ecstasy play into each other in num- 
berless ways. 

The highly wrought religions alone 
attain to a more definite tone of feeling 
corresponding to the more definite 
idea, but even here anything like a 



80 The Value of Religious Facts 

complete harmony is lacking, as the lit- 
erature of Christianity suffices to prove. 

It is, then, easy to show that the re- 
ligious impulse strives for happiness, 
or to show that fear in the presence of 
convulsions of nature, or of an inscrut- 
able fate, or of the future, or of the 
spasms of conscience and the aimless- 
ness of life is the most powerful of re- 
ligious feelings. 

But all these are rather fragments of 
a greater and richer whole, which, even 
in primitive stages, when rightly under- 
stood, overtops mere fear and hope. 
All are concrete attitudes of the self 
to divine powers. All these attitudes 
have the practical bearing that out of 
human fragility, finitude, and sin, a 
new relation, a harmony, is sought and 
found. 

In each attitude there is the impulse 
to make this relation permanent, either 



The Facts of Psychology 81 

in silence and subjection, or in exult- 
ant devotion of the whole self. In 
every single wish and fear this lies con- 
cealed, even when the concrete feeling 
presses forth and seems complete in 
itself. In the higher stages, and as 
the mental evolution progresses, this 
becomes more and more the case ; this 
need of order is the chief source of the 
desires and cravings. 

Herein lies the inexhaustible force of 
religion, and also the inexhaustible im- 
pulse to react upon gods who excite 
these feelings. Herein lies the impulse 
to repeat the religious experience, to 
give oneself up to it and to submit to 
it, until religion becomes a controlling 
force, and not a mere transitory stimu- 
lus of certain thoughts. Herein is the 
ground of the rites which are the re- 
action of men upon the divinity, the 
solemn celebration of the fixed relation 



82 The Value of Religious Facts 

to him, wherein the religious emotion 
presses forth to its own expression and 
strives also to affect the god from 
whom it springs. This occurs in un- 
numbered forms. 

The naif anthropomorphic idea gen- 
erates an anthropomorphic rite with 
incantations which afflict or flatter the 
god into yielding temper; with sacri- 
ficial gifts, to nourish and exhilarate 
the god until he renounces his venge- 
ance or receives homage; with most 
varied symbolic acts, dresses, and 
dances, all of which give utterance to 
active feeling and permanent moods. 

Here, too, the symbolizing imagina- 
tion has a wide field, using all kinds of 
colors, tones, times, and places which 
have any kind of similarity with the 
religious feeling, as means of expression 
and means of influence. Even when 
the service of deeds and morality be- 



The Facts of Psychology &$ 

gins to replace the service of rites, 
these latter, symbolically interpreted, 
are readjusted to the new insight. 

The socializing influence of rites 
increases as the religion develops, if 
not in intensity, certainly in range. 
The ancestor worship of one clan 
widens into communions which submit 
their lives to one supreme social pur- 
pose in all parts of the world. 

No religion is complete without a 
common expression of its gratitude 
and of its aspirations; and in propor- 
tion as it fails to communicate the com- 
mon idea, it drops its adherents, and 
its life is doomed. Upon the personal 
faith rests the inner reality of religion ; 
upon rites its propagation and con- 
stancy. And only as a social fact has 
it historical power. The crises in re- 
ligious history are due chiefly to the 
fact that the actual inner religious life 



84 The Value of Religious Facts 

does not harmonize with the idea. 
This becomes too often a memory 
without direct relation to the will. Re- 
ligion is degraded to formal assent 
to statements or traditions, to lavish 
ceremonies, to materialism and bigotry, 
becomes the tool of rulers, the game 
of logic choppers, instead of the freest, 
most delicate, most versatile and inex- 
pressible of all the activities of the soul. 

The whole discussion gives us then 
psychological facts. And they permit 
us to treat religion as a unit and to 
trace the whole enormous mass of ap- 
parently contradictory forms to simple 
sources: the belief in a higher power 
which gives us what is best in our lives. 

As psychological constructions, ab- 
stracted from life, they appear dry and 
brittle, in comparison with infinitely 
versatile and complex reality. No one 
of them gives a concrete case in its 



The Facts of Psychology 85 

purity. Such artificial conceptions, 
however, are necessary in science, not 
to replace reality, but to explain it. 
These general principles then may 
serve for the understanding of concrete 
religious facts and for the discovery of 
the bond which unites the masses of 
single cases. 

The problem of the separate religions 
in their inner unity remains, not that 
which collects every detail of the single 
religions, but that which searches for 
the psychical forces which give an 
organization to each. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FACTS OF HISTORY 

THE psychology of religion gives us 
the general facts which lie at the 
root of the countless forms of the social 
religions. It does not show the histori- 
cal beginning of religion from which 
all start ; the first form of religion, like 
all the origins of the race, eludes scien- 
tific analysis. What little we know is 
due to inferences and combinations. 

Psychology gives the general, per- 
manent basis of the religious facts, 
which are continually taking new form. 
We never directly find these psycho- 
logical constructions; they occur, in 
reality, in multitudes of complicated 
86 



The Facts of History 87 

combinations. They never apply im- 
mediately to a particular case; rather 
they mark out the lines within which 
the historical facts move. The prob- 
lem then is: how do these general 
principles apply to the historical re- 
ligions ? 

Answers may be from many points of 
view. The question is answered by 
the rigid historian or by the searcher 
for picturesque historical material as if 
we had to do with unconnected or acci- 
dentally related movements of ideas. 

This attitude has been already dis- 
cussed. But the belief that there is 
some teleological connection of reality, 
which is the same as the belief in the 
normality of our thinking, demands 
other treatment of religious facts. 
Some such belief as this must be pre- 
supposed. 

The question is then : how upon this 



88 The Value of Religious Facts 



;-^- 



basis are the developments of religion 
to be understood ? Fascinating writers 
recognize the charm of the inexhaust- 
ibly rich and vivid details of religious 
ideas, or even admit the truth that 
there is a satisfaction of the deepest 
needs ; they enjoy the marvellous 
poetry, but any serious comparison or 
interrelation they condemn as bigotry 
or pedantry. This habit of mind is 
most useful in specialized work, but 
useless for the appreciation of the facts 
as a whole. The aesthetic sensitiveness 
cares nothing for a consistent attitude 
towards religion alone. 

A more natural attempt to treat re- 
ligion as independent of other activi- 
ties is that which recognizes a final 
purpose, but only as a combination of 
details of different kinds. A union or 
fusion of all separate religions in an 
abstract final form would be the aim 



The Facts of History 89 

and the criterion, such as Spencer's 
Unknowable or Goblet d'Alviella's Syn- 
cretism, which unites in one what is 
common to all. This is certainly a 
tempting method. 

But the result is a very scanty gen- 
eral conception, rather an extremely 
cautious metaphysical abstraction than 
a religion with a right to live. The 
effort expended to produce it seems 
disproportionately large. Can one be- 
lieve that so much of the most won- 
derful religious energy, of the deepest 
thought and sensitiveness ends in so 
very modest and vague a result ? 

It is certainly another example of 
the emptiness and limpness of a re- 
ligion scientifically metaphysical, but 
lacking in the creative force which a 
clear and energetic belief in a personal 
Power generates. 

Actual power, as history shows, 



90 The Value of Religious Facts 

springs only from religions which are 
certain that they see into the depth of 
a special relation of God. An eclectic 
and rational religion, or a synthetic 
faith, breeds a frigid kind of devotee, 
and dies when the original religious 
fervor has wasted away. No mental 
evolution proceeds by making abstract 
universal conceptions of concrete cases 
emptied of their contents and stripped 
of their individuality, but by the growth 
of some germinating principle, which 
bears the future in itself and unfolds its 
full meaning in definite, and more and 
more apparent, form. 

It is then correct when other thinkers 
turn against this tone of generalization 
and insist that individualizing must be 
the method. In natural science general 
conceptions must be the means and 
the end of knowledge, but in history, 
as they maintain, generalizations can 



The Facts of History 91 

be understood only as they apply to 
concrete cases. 

The aim of historical life should be a 
constant differentiation which replaces 
forms less capable of development by 
more permanent forms of more real 
capacity. The specific is always the 
mystery of life, and the demand for life 
is a demand for details, which gradually 
sweeps into itself what satisfies its 
single needs. 

Kaftan has applied this principle to 
the history of religion with beautiful 
precision, and Windelband discusses it 
in his inaugural address as Rector of 
Strassburg. Both of them, of course, 
assume a reasonable teleological con- 
nection of concrete cases; and if the 
assumption is a belief only, it is a be- 
lief bound up with most personal feel- 
ings. 

Still such a belief is given with the 



92 The Value of Religious Facts 

belief in the normality of human think- 
ing, and this belief is inseparable from 
personal and historical life. One must 
believe that reality reveals itself to 
men in new and higher forms. It 
must be assumed that knowledge of 
the course of events is dependent upon 
one's own desire for truth. One can 
certainly find out the course of develop- 
ment, but personal attitudes play their 
part, and such discoveries are therefore 
never completely accurate. 

Any work of general history might 
serve as an example. There is no 
ready-made standard of comparison 
with which one may judge the pro- 
gress and the goal; just as there is 
no scale to estimate the growth of 
mathematics or of any science, except 
so far as the higher stage is self-evident 
and includes and explains the lower. 

Without a standard, and without a 



The Facts of History 93 

ready-made ideal, man stands in the 
midst of ideals and overpowers the 
lower by the effective power of 
the higher. In spite of mistakes and 
confusion, the balance is secured again. 
Thus in the history of religions one 
can do no more than to confide in the 
actual course of ideals and seek the goal 
where the force of the ideals upon 
the wills of men, in various forms of 
adaptation, establishes their authority. 
This whole theory rests upon the as- 
sumption that the same reason which 
is valid in the human mind is valid in 
the universe, and that here as well as 
there it contains the impulse to unfold 
its deepest meaning. This conviction 
is a belief. In religion this belief has 
a wider basis and inevitable compul- 
sory force. For religion is not a mass 
of progressing human thoughts and 
ideas, but a series of divine acts and 



94 The Value of Religious Facts 

revelations. It must rest upon a con- 
tinual working of the divine thought 
upon the human thought. If we have 
to renounce the attempt to know the 
law of the divine work, it still remains 
the essence of religion that we believe 
in a permanent, divine action. All 
human history is not merely a joining 
together of human subjective attitudes, 
but a gradual adjustment of human 
wills to the divine will. 

In non-sensuous knowledge this in- 
terchange with a non-sensuous world 
becomes more evident. The ethic and 
aesthetical enter unobstrusively into 
the psychical mechanism and act as 
higher standards of judgment within 
the stream of ideas and feelings, but 
religion brings the single soul into rela- 
tion with the divine reason, the power 
which underlies all things. 

With the existence of these judg- 



The Facts of History 95 

ments an intuitive sense of an over- 
sensuous world of values, which are 
valid in themselves, is bound up, and 
thus, in religion, direct contact with 
the centre of this world is found, and 
there these regulative principles secure 
a firm basis as the acts of a personal 
force. 

Without religion history becomes a 
mass of records of civilizations in which 
ethical and aesthetic insights prevail, 
but without any connection with a non- 
sensuous world, and without a well- 
founded thought of the origin and 
purpose of the world. 

But in religion, within the texture of 
history, there enters comparison by the 
individual of himself with the ground 
and the significance of reality and of 
all life, and the conviction is attained 
that man is not merely the subject of 
actually existing ideal habits of judg- 



96 The Value of Religious Facts 

ing, and not merely the product of 
their wide-spread authority in civiliza- 
tion, but that he, with them, is related 
to an over-sensuous world which he 
experiences in them, and which is act- 
ively engaged in drawing him to itself 
and moulding him for itself. 

For scientific historical writing the 
movements of civilization are a proper 
and an easily controlled object, but for 
a belief in a significance in history the 
religious experience must be the found- 
ation. Historical narrative of single 
religious movements rightly disregards 
these points of view, but any attempt 
to understand religious history as a 
whole must accept this attitude, or 
else maintain that its work is a history 
of illusions. Its development must be 
the giving from a divine source, and 
this gift must progressively disclose it- 
self as the truth of religion. 



The Facts of History 97 

But there is still another objection to 
this interpretation of religious history, 
which is made by the closest observers 
of facts. They cannot help noticing 
that in the religions it is not a ques- 
tion of receiving and possessing divine 
effects which men build into their social 
life, and thus, in countless ways, re- 
model it, but, before all else, it is a 
search and longing for God, an effort 
and a determination, the final result 
of which seems to be the great re- 
ligions. 

The religious impulse has often been 
mentioned, which is said to bring forth 
the religions. But it is just this word 
11 impulse " which leads us to a right 
understanding of this fact, which then 
adjusts itself easily to the previous 
result of this discussion. 

This is one of the words, seemingly 
clear and simple, which signifies a whole 



98 The Value of Religious Facts 

coil of intricate processes. An impulse 
is an excitation of the will which, as 
every other excitation, presupposes a 
stimulus exciting the feeling and arous- 
ing voluntary activity. But in the 
case of the impulse, the stimulus and 
the corresponding aim remain half ob- 
scured. A half-conscious state arouses 
the will and keeps before it obscure 
but deeply felt aims. Impulses play 
their part in the unconscious depths of 
the soul. Here the connection of the 
inner life with the surrounding world 
produces impulses and directions of 
aim which drive men to conscious 
questions about the objects they seek 
and compel them to a clear knowledge 
of their own purposes. 

Precisely so the religious impulse is 
the subsoil or the forerunner of all 
conscious and definite religion which 
attempts to apprehend the divine com- 



The Facts of History 99 

munion and comes to rest in the know- 
ledge of what it sought. 

It is the stimulus of the inner life, 
by the divine life which sustains the 
soul, which pours into it the impulse 
towards the divine, and which makes 
its effect in the adjustment of the hu- 
man to the divine life, just as in all 
other human impulses there is an ad- 
justment in the unconscious inner life 
to the surrounding world which sustains 
it. 

One cannot explain these impulses 
as a mass of acquired or inherited ex- 
periences. Instincts, of course, accom- 
pany such impulse, but the unconscious 
impulse has preceded and made the 
simplest of such experiences possible. 
At the same time it must be borne in 
mind that the impulse is only the dim 
threshold and beginning of definite 
historical religions; that they always 



ioo The Value of Religious Facts 

refer their origin to revelations of the 
divinity, which arouse the impulse and 
satisfy it. 

In a great religious genius this satis- 
faction is accomplished without diffi- 
culty. And in the social group the 
impulse adjusts itself to the religious 
tradition so long as the belief remains 
unshaken. Where, however, for any 
reason, the simple belief in the tradi- 
tion is broken, there the characteristic 
wavering of the impulse begins, grasp- 
ing now in haste at all conceivable 
baits, withdrawing now into itself in 
mysticism, or taking refuge in foreign 
and preposterous substitutes, or even 
trying to demonstrate to itself that it 
does not exist. These are the oppor- 
tunities for great constructive religious 
leaders. 

Such crises usually begin in doubt 
about the actual truth of the religious 



The Facts of History 101 

idea, due, for the most part, to scien- 
tific reflection. In this way another 
class of objections to the reality of 
religious history begins. 

However much one may be con- 
vinced of the practical, non-intellectual 
character of religion, nothing seems to 
observation of concrete instances to 
have had a greater influence upon the 
growth and the transformation, as well 
as upon the simplest expression of the 
religious idea, than mythological and 
scientific thought. 

Progress in religions may often be 
traced to progress of thought and of 
knowledge of the world, and every his- 
tory of religious development is a part 
of the history of the formation of ideas, 
their confusions, fusions, and exuber- 
ances. History of religion seems to be 
the history of human theories. 

But, in the first place, the parallel- 



102 The Value of Religious Facts 



t> 



ism of religious and of mental move- 
ments is far from complete, and every 
careful analysis shows that some sim- 
ple religious conception is the material 
for religious meditation, imagination, 
teaching, or artistic expression. The 
contents of the religious life are the 
material, and not the product, of 
thinking. Thinking, even in its im- 
aginative form, is always the connect- 
ing of contents of experience. It is 
certainly true that the contents influ- 
ence every moment the connecting 
activities, and always present them- 
selves in groups and indicate the di- 
rection for the organization of new 
contents. These are widened and 
combined, or caricatured and confused, 
or enriched and purified and made 
permanent by reflection. Human in- 
tercourse with the perceived and the 
non-perceptible world is never without 



The Facts of History 103 

such comprehensive activity, but reflec- 
tion is never more than the attempt to 
group and, by discovery of controlling 
points of view, to increase the attention 
and the receptive capacity for fresh 
contents of experience. 

This distinction is decisive for the 
understanding of concrete historical 
religions. An attentive reader will 
always notice the passages in religious 
histories where the simple facts of re- 
ligion are described, or where altera- 
tions and interpretations are introduced 
by reflection. In accordance with their 
theories of the philosophy of history, 
authors of such histories attempt ex- 
planations or insert them into the facts. 
Some few select souls trace the divisions 
and the transformations of the religions 
with perfect accuracy. Oldenberg's 
works on the Buddha and the Vedic 
Religion, Rohde's great work, Jean 



104 The Value of Religious Facts 

Reville's exquisite picture of the Ro- 
man syncretism, and Mr. Frazer's and 
Professor Tylor's careful volumes indi- 
cate what may be done. Such works 
are histories, and not examples of the 
desire to construct historical facts. 

In these histories the importance of 
reflection upon religion receives its full 
estimate. For religion, by reason of 
the anthropomorphic and symbolizing 
character of the religious imagination, 
is closely related to the mythological, 
and by its demand for the uncondi- 
tioned and infinite, to scientific think- 
ing. 

By mythological habits of thought, 
which are not a form of religion, but a 
general primitive form of thinking, the 
religious objects are connected with 
other objects of personifying thinking; 
and new objects fuse with the former 
anthropomorphic images and add new, 



The Facts of History 105 

sharply defined ideas of gods. Priests 
and poets take possession of these 
forms. The whole world of ideas is 
modified. But the first conception, 
vague, involuntary, not made, nor dis- 
covered, close in touch with the re- 
ligious impulse, is never the same as 
the secondary forms of priests or of 
popular superstition. 

This mythological thinking never 
entirely disappears, especially among 
the classes which cling to the products 
of the imagination and dissect the re- 
ligious principle into outer facts and 
processes. Where, beside mythologic 
thinking, scientific thinking with its 
search for unity, necessity, and univer- 
sality arises, there the effects of thought 
upon religion are far more decisive. 

Scientific thinking has nearly every- 
where sprung from religion; the idea 
of divine powers impels the search for 



106 The Value of Religious Facts 

cosmical connections. The more it be- 
comes independent, the more it re- 
acts, since the ideas of laws of nature 
and of social life stimulate new relig- 
ious impressions which refine the ideas 
with regard to the gods and make 
them the bearers of general laws. 

In the adjustment of the old founda- 
tions of the natural religion to the new 
ethical and more delicate discoveries, 
the greater part of conscious religious 
thought is spent. These new religious 
experiences, which proceed from the 
new cosmical, moral, legal, or ritual 
laws, set in motion a whole series of 
speculations, which play about religion, 
but never coincide with it. 

When, however, scientific reflection 
progresses to the theory that nature is 
a mechanism, mythological forms of 
religion are shattered, and nature can- 
not transmit any religious impression. 



The Facts of History 107 

Religious belief dwindles to a vague 
hypothesis of an infinite unity which 
gives consistency to a whole. This 
course of religious life is beautifully 
shown in the history of Greek religion, 
beginning with the spiritualizing of 
the forces of nature and ending in 
Jamblichus. 

It cannot, then, be the aim of the 
history of religion to find the founda- 
tion of religious conviction in scientific 
evidence. Such a theory can only be 
valid on the presupposition that religion 
is a purely human product of civiliza- 
tion. It would be assumed that the 
first primitive forms of mythological 
thinking made inferences with regard 
to religion in fantastic confusion, and 
that the elements of truth in these at- 
tempts have been disclosed by the 
rigorous methods of science. 

This view of the case contradicts 



108 The Value of Religious Facts 

what religion has to say about itself 
as well as the actual facts. Scientific 
enrichment and criticism of religion in 
Greece and India developed religion so 
long only as they used the old conclu- 
sions as points of departure for new. 
They clung to the belief that the gods 
are active, and they assimilated to this 
the new thought they had to offer. 
When reflection went farther to the 
building of independent religious sys- 
tems, these were religious in so far as 
they used the material which was de- 
livered by the popular faith. 

Rationally constructed religion leans 
upon positive religion. The first com- 
bines material into a self-sufficient 
whole, the second insists upon a 
communication from outside. The 
issue between them is the method of 
treating of the same experiences. In 
proportion as the productive power of 



The Facts of History 109 

thinking increases, the religious effect 
of these ideas decreases. 

A correctly reasoned God is not the 
object of religious devotion. Live re- 
ligion withdraws into its mystic state 
of impulses, or is repressed and dis- 
heartened by materialistic, hedonistic, 
or non-committal systems. Sharp think- 
ing can lift and purify religion to a cer- 
tain degree only ; if this limit be passed, 
it shatters the ideas and other religious 
growths spring up. 

But if religion can never be replaced 
by science, neither can they be fully 
divorced from each other. Religion 
cannot remain uninfluenced by science. 
Each plays into the hands of the other: 
the one, a more esoteric religion of 
thinkers of scientific habits; and the 
other, a more exoteric of the social 
forms of religion. Each group acts as 
a corrective of the other. 



no The Value of Religious Facts 

Religion strives for an unhampered, 
absolutely present grasp of its ob- 
ject without any If or But ; and 
masses eager for authority and unac- 
customed to the freedom and uncer- 
tainty of personal judgment cling with 
the whole passion of their religious 
nature to the received ideas and cus- 
toms. 

On the other hand, every careful 
thinker tries to bring the religious 
objects into accord with all his other 
knowledge. In proportion, then, to the 
energy, the freedom, and the range of 
thought change is made in the form of 
the religious ideas. These two atti- 
tudes, the scientific and the social, 
towards religion, are more certain to 
arise as a religion becomes finer and 
less mechanical. So long as both 
equalize each other, the religious con- 
dition remains healthy. But if the 



The Facts of History in 

tension becomes too great, the form of 
religion which has hitherto existed falls 
to pieces. 

In this tension between religion and 
scientific thinking theology obtains its 
right to existence as a buffer between 
two forces. Or rather it tries to bring 
the belief of the religious social body 
into a tolerable relation with the sur- 
rounding culture. But in this process 
it is likely to modify in some degree 
the religious objects. It is born of 
compromise, and bears all the advan- 
tages and disadvantages of a compro- 
mise, now too near to ecclesiastical 
machinery, and now to pure science. 
The churches cannot dispense alto- 
gether with it, nor can they long endure 
a single form of it. It clings to science 
and yet is not science, but an applica- 
tion of scientific principles to ecclesias- 
tical purposes. Nowadays the discord 



ii2 The Value of Religious Facts 

between science and religion seems to 
have become less harsh. 

In consideration of all that precedes, 
it is clear that religious history may be 
regarded as a whole, that there is no 
religious life which is not the result of 
supersensuous power in the form of 
the stimulation or satisfaction of im- 
pulses of will. And historical research 
cannot discover in each religion the 
divine activity, for that is an object of 
will-attitude and not of science. But 
it is content to leave the actual facts 
to rest upon themselves, and not to 
struggle to deduce them from other 
facts. In this way it becomes easier 
to believe in a progressive revelation of 
God in history, and to believe that the 
special features of the religions are 
parts of a whole. 

Individual peculiarities in the great 
groups form a comparate series, in 



The Facts of History 113 

which the character of religion differ- 
entiates itself more clearly, sharply, 
and deeply. And this series depends 
upon the operation of the divine life. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE VALUES AND THE STANDARD 

WITH the establishment of the 
right to believe that religion 
may be treated as independent of other 
forms of life and that the different re- 
ligions are comparable parts of a whole, 
we come to the crux of religious sci- 
ence: the problem of arranging them 
as a series with reference to a standard 
of comparison, a series which would 
give us some kind of a scale of values. 
It need not be repeated that we have 
no ready-made scale. 

How, then, ought one to attack the 
material, as endless as the material of 
the natural sciences ? How can one fix 
114 



The Values and the Standard 115 

the common marks in the multitude of 
variations and bring order into the con- 
fusion ? 

A grouping of the religions by com- 
mon race or by political unities, or by 
other limits of space or time is certainly 
the most natural step towards the sim- 
plification of the task, just as natural 
sciences construct special laws for single 
parts of nature. We should thus deal 
in the lives of countless men and women 
with common ideas, feelings, attitudes 
of willjCommon changes from one group 
of emotions to another group. In the 
great masses of religious bodies there 
is no considerable difference in the 
leading ideas, in the kind of emotions, 
in the rules for religious acts. 

How far might it be right, following 
the method of natural sciences, to con- 
tinue this grouping, and to include by 
induction constantly wider masses of 



n6 The Value of Religious Facts 

facts under more general laws ? There 
is no doubt of the success of this 
method in the case of natural science. 
Might there not be the same success, if 
an attempt were made to discover com- 
mon psychical facts and connections in 
widening tracts of the religious life of 
past and present mankind ? 

The difficulty is at once apparent. 
Natural science attains complete defi- 
niteness in its most inclusive laws, be- 
cause it can fix calculable relations of 
quantity. But how can one attain a 
similar exactness in psychical sciences 
which have to do with a vast extent of 
disparate mental states and connec- 
tions ? 

Concrete cases we have: for ex- 
ample, the psychical experience of the 
devout Athenian at the time of the 
Persian invasion, the pride in his city, 
the joy of living which this pride in- 



The Values and the Standard 1 1 7 

fused in him, the idea of the goddess 
and of the gods and heroes who had 
protected the metropolis from the 
beginning of its days. This we can 
make vivid to ourselves. Likewise 
with Israel at many crises. 

If, however, we attempt another step 
in the induction, what is common to 
both ? In both cases Ave have a com- 
pact national life and a lofty patriotic 
pride, in both cases an idea built by 
the imagination of a cause or causes, 
which work invisibly with more than 
human power, and in both cases a 
trust in this active power. The pro- 
cess is familiar. But are these com- 
mon marks of the same kind as the 
common facts which are established in 
the inductions of natural science ? 

What we obtain is a list of undefined 
general terms: a people, a national 
feeling, a superhuman causality, and a 



n8 The Value of Religious Facts 

trust. But the issue is how these terms 
correspond to inner processes, or how 
the objects correspond to inner pro- 
cesses, which could have definite mean- 
ing to us. When we speak of national 
feeling, one must feel that it corre- 
sponds to something definite in us. 
And this is absolutely necessary in 
practical life and also in science, if it is 
to have any value to us. The value is 
real to us only so far as we compare the 
imagined inner process with an experi- 
ence which has been a part of our own 
inner life. 

If there is a difficulty, it is because 
of the richness of the feelings which 
are active in us. When we speak of 
national feeling it means a most com- 
plicated inner state. The remembrance 
of what the United States has repre- 
sented hitherto in the history of civic 
equality and of popular education, the 



The Values and the Standard 119' 

memory of Washington, of Hawthorne, 
of Sumner, the thought of the intel- 
lectual and aesthetic and political de- 
gradation of masses of our citizens and 
of the present efforts to humanize them, 
the knowledge of the mistrust of our 
motives with regard to Cuba and the 
Philippines, and hundreds of other in- 
tense experiences — all this, in clear, 
individual expression is what our na- 
tional feeling might mean to-day. 

Are we, then, to call all this into con- 
sciousness in order to complete the 
conception of patriotic feeling ? Cer- 
tainly not, for when our own patriotism 
is immediately present, all the actual 
situation, upon which the feeling de- 
pends, need not be present. We 
abstract from the whole list certain 
aspects which are in more direct rela- 
tion to a hypothetical, typically ex- 
pressed situation and fix them in our 



120 The Value of Religious Facts 

consciousness. We imagine how we 
should react, if the nation were insulted 
by foreigners, or if there ever should 
be real need of a war. 

In this hypothetical experience we 
can construct the inner processes for 
each one of these situations. And 
after abstraction of details, the inner 
process which is called patriotism is 
still present to us in definite shape. 

This is very far from being a general 
conception of natural science. It is a 
conception for comparison for the pur- 
pose of understanding a foreign ex- 
perience. We can thus measure the 
patriotism of a German, for example, 
by a comparison with this conception 
which is abstracted from our own pa- 
triotism. This patriotism of his is 
bound up with a mass of historical, and 
therefore individual, attitudes. This 
historical aspect I can imagine, but 



The Values and the Standard 121 

cannot keep present in consciousness 
except in fragments. 

We are limited then to fixing in some 
form an outline of our own national 
feeling, and then, later, to make clear 
by comparison the difference of the 
German's in certain definite situations, 
to discover how, under the same cir- 
cumstances, my patriotism, similar 
though it be, would react in a different 
manner, or how, under the same condi- 
tions in which I actually am, or in 
which I imagine myself, the patriotism 
of the German would react differently 
from mine. 

This conception of comparison indi- 
cates how the inner process of another 
may be hypothetically repeated in my- 
self upon the basis of my own inner 
processes. It makes inner life, which 
is strange to us knowable, by giving us 
a clue by which we may hypothetically 



122 The Value of Religious Facts 

live ourselves into the same. This 
clue, a definite inner process of our 
own, is the foundation for our repeti- 
tion of the process strange to us. 

This foundation, however, in case of 
exact hypothetical repetition of the 
strange life, must be modified in differ- 
ent single features. 

In daily life we use quantities of con- 
ceptions of comparison of just this 
kind. They rise into our minds in 
countless numbers whenever we read a 
historical book. We take up the first 
book before our eyes and we read in 
Bismarck's A utobiography of his annoy- 
ance and indignation at Gortschakow's 
forcing him to pay for the numerous 
telegrams from the Russian Foreign 
Office. A mass of conceptions of com- 
parison break out within us as we recall 
similar vivid inner states when we our- 
selves were in other lands. 



The Values and the Standard 123 

If, now, we apply this result to two 
cases in religious history into whose 
inner life we wish to penetrate, it will 
be necessary for us to revivify the 
memory of those inner experiences of 
our own which are most like theirs, 
and we must reproduce these pro- 
cesses in more or less modified form 
with regard to each one of the re- 
ligions. 

Or, in general terms, we may say: 
in natural science the inductive method 
aims at forming a connection between 
many facts or occurrences by proving 
that calculable relations of quantity 
prevail between them, which relations 
reoccur in many other cases ; but in the 
science of religion, induction is com- 
pelled to make a connection between 
many other cases by arranging those 
which are similar with regard to a con- 
ception of comparison, as clearly de- 



124 The Value of Religious Facts 

fined as is possible by hypothetical 
repetition. 

Proceeding now with this inductive 
method to religion as a whole, we com- 
pare the common traits of all religions. 

We fix, by means of a standard of 
comparison or a group of standards, 
such an inner state of our own or our 
hypothetical experiences, from which 
we may start when we wish to put our- 
selves in the spirit of any other religion. 

Suppose we start with a conception 
of religion as an inner experience in 
which the struggle for life, in face of 
impassable limits, strives to find satis- 
faction with the help of a power which 
gives the highest good. What would 
be the meaning of this conception ? 
So far as it has any religious meaning 
it must take a personal form. If it is 
to help me to reach the religious atti- 
tude of any strange religion, the strug- 



The Values and the Standard 125 

gle must be felt as my own struggle, 
the life must be one with a definite 
series of incidents for me, the limits 
must be thought as barriers to my own 
efforts, the satisfaction must be attained 
by the thought of a causality which re- 
veals the highest happiness within my 
own self. 

In all these inner experiences the 
experience is individual, and bound up 
with personal feelings of self. But the 
connection of such experiences with the 
individual self is by no means common 
to all religions. In many of them per- 
sonal feelings are repressed so far as 
possible, even to the point of exter- 
mination. The feeling of limitation 
then would have a decidedly different 
meaning. In fact all the inner pro- 
cesses which have been mentioned, 
would have different bearings in other 
religions. 



126 The Value of Religious Facts 

Hence, when we try to penetrate 
into the will-attitudes of another re- 
ligion, it cannot be by a single re- 
production of our own individual 
experience, but by a comparison of 
the individual qualities of the religious 
processes which we are trying to under- 
stand. Suppose it be granted that such 
a method gives precision and vividness 
to our understanding of other religions. 
Would the objection be valid that it is 
a good practical procedure, but undis- 
ciplined and therefore unscientific ? 

Would not a scientific method consist 
just in this, that it omits the individual 
aspects of one's own experience which 
have been obtained by standards of 
comparison such as are in daily use, 
and that it reproduces whatever in our 
own experience remains ? We should 
make use of the conception of com- 
parison by reducing it to what is the 



The Values and the Standard 127 

same in the different cases with which 
it is compared. This would be a re- 
turn, as a matter of principle, to the 
ideal of the general conceptions of 
natural science. 

It must certainly be admitted that 
forms of psychical life are the same in 
all men, although developed in differ- 
ent degrees of fineness. The convic- 
tion that the race is a psychical unity 
leads us to this conclusion, and also 
the fact that it is impossible to make 
the inner lives of other men compre- 
hensible on any other supposition. 
Further than this, we do as a matter 
of experience understand the lives of 
other men upon the basis of this as- 
sumption. 

Wherever the inner processes, which 
we define in our conceptions of com- 
parison, are those sensations, emotions, 
and efforts which arise out of the im- 



128 The Value of Religious Facts 

pressions of the external world upon 
our bodily organism, we may assume 
an identity between the kind of these 
inner processes in others and in our- 
selves. When we feel thirst or hunger, 
and cold or heat, we need not have 
conscientious doubts whether others 
feel as we do under similar bodily con- 
ditions. There are then tracts of inner 
life, which so far as they concern con- 
ceptions of comparison, may be treated 
as identical, as much so as if we com- 
pare them by rules of natural science, 
with the only exception that we start 
from our own experience. 

Whenever, however, we enter those 
inner experiences which are the life of 
the real subject, his desires, his wishes, 
his purposes, his reflections, his deci- 
sions, his enthusiasms, his pleasures 
and pains, his joys and hopes and ex- 
pectations, his attentions and imagina- 



The Values and the Standard 129 

tions, all that affects his self, all that 
brings him into intercourse with other 
men, the whole situation changes. 

This life is history, a gradually un- 
folding quantity of relations of inner 
lives. The share in this life is propor- 
tional to the richness of the individual 
inner life in its reactions upon the 
multitude of impressions from other in- 
dividuals. Here conceptions of compar- 
ison are constantly arising in order to 
estimate the individual qualities of the 
unexplored inner lives of other persons. 

If we approach that activity of the 
inner life which is religious, the indi- 
vidual attitudes become enormous and 
the conceptions of comparison indefi- 
nitely great. There are such extreme 
discrepancies from our own attitude as 
the Buddhist with his renunciation of 
individual desire, or as the believer 

in priestly authority who believes in 

9 



130 The Value of Religious Facts 

gods because of confidence in other 
men's conceptions of comparison. Con- 
ceivably, one might rule that these are 
not strictly religions, as natural science 
rejects from a certain group all phe- 
nomena which do not conform to the 
laws which prevail in that group. But 
what would be the gain ? Are not all 
other religions full of individual points 
of view ? And if these be eliminated, 
what would be left ? The alternative 
would then be either sharply to define 
each religion, giving it its individual 
values, which are far from coinciding 
with the values of other religions, or to 
allow the conception of comparison 
to become so vague that it becomes 
worthless. There is then no possibility 
in the comparison of religions, so to 
arrange the conception of comparison 
that it contains only what is everywhere 
identical. 



The Values and the Standard 131 

One possible evasion of the difficulty 
there might be. The confusion might 
be thought to come from the complex- 
ity of the conception of comparison, 
due to the highly organized character 
of our own inner processes. Might 
the method be more successful if we 
substitute for our own experience an 
experience as simple as that of the 
Indian of the Vedic period, who joy- 
fully entreats Varuna for the dark rain 
and promises in return the sacrifice ? 

The scale would start with the most 
elementary form and progress from a 
fixed historical point. But is it so sure 
that, because these religions are the 
simplest, they would be comparable in 
all respects to intricate forms ? Would 
there not be individual aspects of the 
desire for life, of trust, and of the 
other subjective attitudes, which would 
differentiate them from any other re- 



132 The Value of Religious Facts 

ligions ? Would there be any use for a 
conception of comparison ? 

Definite objections prevent the use 
of rudimentary religions as standards of 
comparison. It would be by no means 
easy to make completely clear the 
peculiar inner processes of such a re- 
ligion, just because our life is so far 
more intense and reflective and so more 
extended in its causes and effects. Be- 
fore such could be a standard it would 
itself need to be explained. Another 
objection is the difficulty of deciding 
upon any one particular religion when 
once one's own is discarded. One 
fixes upon the Vedas, another upon 
the Sumerian, a third upon the Bantus 
and their fetishes, or upon the totem- 
ists as the simplest form. 

In any case, then, there would be 
disagreement about the particular con- 
ception of comparison which would be 



The Values and the Standard 133 

applied. But this difficulty is common 
to all sciences which treat of will-atti- 
tudes in any but purely psychological 
terms. If these conceptions lead us to 
inner processes which we ourselves ex- 
perience, the contents will differ in 
proportion to the varying complexity 
and varying depth of the inner life. 

We take up a book of subtle insight 
like Maurice Maeterlinck's La Sagcsse 
ct la Dcstinte and try to interpret what 
he means by " bonte" or " douleur." 
We are sure that the inner life which 
these words symbolize is of different 
quality from any that most of us have 
felt with any permanence or intensity. 
And all the wealth of our own life and 
of our share in others' lives does not 
exhaust the full significance of the 
words. The conception of comparison 
betrays its variability. This uncer- 
tainty is never completely destroyed. 



134 The Value of Religious Facts 

One can only expect a certain unity of 
conceptions of comparison, by which 
we make our inner life intelligible to 
others, among persons of similar edu- 
cation, who are in active exchange 
of mental products. However, not 
only compulsory intercourse, but the 
thought that there are standards for 
the inner life which are valid for all 
men, equalizes differences of training 
and therefore differences of concep- 
tions. Not satisfied with the fact 
that a certain unity has established 
itself among men, we ask what is the 
right life, the normal life, the perfect 
life. It need not here be inquired 
to what extent the thought of uni- 
versal standards controls men, and 
to what extent within human life a 
region remains where individual in- 
clination and the power of natural im- 
pulses is supreme, and where universal 



The Values and the Standard 135 

standards have no authority. It is 
enough to state that standards actually 
control a wide territory among men, 
that moral standards are recognized 
without exceptions and enforced to the 
point of the penalty of death, that the 
sense of beauty is opposed to individual 
peculiarities of taste, and that true 
knowledge is contrasted with perver- 
sions of fact. 

Likewise in the religious life the con- 
viction prevails that one form of re- 
ligion must be the true, the right, the 
beautiful, and that this religion should 
be contrasted with others. Whatever 
be said of the right of these convictions 
to existence, they are certainly useful to 
procure unified conceptions of com- 
parison. 

If there are standards which are valid 
for the inner life, recognized as normal 
in great tracts of human society, they 



136 The Value of Religious Facts 



are more fit than the wavering state of 
actual opinion to be applied as the 
criteria of the different concrete cases. 

Instead then of adopting any kind of 
an elementary religion, or the present 
state of our own religious life, which in 
its imperfection often appears to our- 
selves as foreign, we choose as our point 
of departure that form of religious life 
which, according to our own convic- 
tion, is normal, and which we are striv- 
ing to make real in our own inner life. 

Thus we free ourselves from the aim- 
lessness and futility of the conception 
of comparison, and we express in the 
clearest possible outlines a standard of 
comparison. From this point we pro- 
ceed to understand the forms which 
differ from it, and we proceed to give 
to the facts their values. In this way 
religions may be arranged in a scale. 
And their rank in this scale would be 



The Values and the Standard 137 

determined by the answer to this ques- 
tion : are the characteristics of the 
standard religion clear and controlling 
in the single religions ? 

This conclusion that religions are 
comparable with reference to their 
agreement to a norm will be met with 
distrust from more than one side. One 
might fear that the concrete religions 
would be stripped of their historical 
character and trimmed down to normal 
abstractions. But rather the contrary 
is the case. The thought that the 
characteristics of the normal religion 
are nowhere present in equal comple- 
tion, purity, clearness, and force would 
tend to emphasize the peculiarities and 
lay bare all the individual imperfections. 
A general concept of science would be 
far more likely to ignore or violate 
historical facts. 

Another objection is weightier : that, 



138 The Value of Religious Facts 

since the standard religion is the com- 
plete religion of our own conviction, 
we should substitute the Christian re- 
ligion. But certainly a part only of 
students of religion believe that the 
Christian religion is the complete re- 
ligion. Many representatives of the 
science of religion substitute some 
modern religion, or, like Renan, some 
individual sesthetical revelling in subtle 
thoughts as the perfect faith. The 
scale of values is changed, and univer- 
sality, the mark of science, lost. But 
that need be no ground for despair of 
success in coming to an understanding. 
As the Christian religion frees itself 
from accretions and increases its inten- 
sifying of the moral life, more serious 
persons will submit to its influence than 
ever. And the admission that it is the 
complete religion may also come from 
those outside its life, who hypotheti- 



The Values and the Standard 139 

cally live themselves into it. And, in 
the second place, even if there be con- 
flicts with regard to the standard, there 
may be common scientific work with 
those from whom we dissent. In spite 
even of conflict we may learn from 
each other. I may compare their con- 
ception of complete religion with mine ; 
I may appropriate their results and in- 
terpret them into my own language. I 
can calculate how the relative position 
of certain points from one point of 
view seems to change when a point 
at a distance is taken by another ob- 
server. The procedure becomes ex- 
tremely complicated. But, after all, is 
it so very uncommon ? Does it not 
happen whenever we read with insight 
a book written by one from whom we 
differ or by one into whose attitude 
towards life we must project our im- 
agination ? The task becomes easier 



140 The Value of Religious Facts 

then in proportion as each one speaks 
out clearly and describes the stand- 
ard towards which he himself is work- 
ing. 

In spite of these objections, then, 
one may insist upon ranking religions 
in conformity to a conception of a 
normal religion. The object of the 
science is the religious life of human- 
ity. Religious science shares in all the 
difficulties and all the dignities of the 
other normative sciences. 

A classification of human knowledge 
with references to these sciences might 
make the result which we have reached 
more clear. The first group would 
consist of all sciences which consider 
events in time and space, in measuring 
size, duration, position, and degree, in 
discovering causal relations which may 
be described in definite numerical quan- 
tities. By the establishment of such 



The Values and the Standard 141 

laws we make our world into a scien- 
tifically measurable world. 

A second group would discover yet 
other laws beside causal laws, laws 
which rearrange facts with reference to 
the adjustment of parts to a whole. 
Every whole is regarded as an end to 
which a series of events works together. 
Events are classed in so far as they aid 
or obstruct this end. When this con- 
ception of purpose is applied to nature 
the whole arouses not only our desire 
for knowledge but our interest and 
sympathy. We rearrange nature with 
reference to our own interests. 

A third group brings us to the inner 
life wherein we take attitudes towards 
all that is causal or suited to a purpose. 
We compare the endless variety with 
our own self. We judge each detail 
with reference to a standard higher 
than ourselves. All the countless ob- 



142 The Value of Religious Facts 

jects which mankind in the course of 
history has found to be of worth, we 
ourselves estimate with regard to what 
we deem precious for our own life. 
From the higher point of view we judge 
them with reference to the standards 
by which we decide what the complete 
inner life must be which ought to be 
realized concretely among men. Thus 
we attain to a scale for human values. 

It is a special case of this last class 
when we measure the different histori- 
cal forms of religious life by compari- 
son with that which belongs to normal 
religious life, or, more accurately, with 
that which, in our conviction, is char- 
acteristic of the full, harmonious re- 
ligious life. 

If this method be applied in the 
science of religion it ought not to seem 
a strange procedure. We are perfectly 
familiar with it in popular usage. Out 



The Values and the Standard 143 

of what we know of religious life in 
our own experience we decide what in 
the life of humanity deserves this 
name, and this we never succeed in 
doing unless we make some kind of 
a scale. 

If it be objected that this popular 
method should be discouraged and re- 
pressed and that religious science must 
give up any attempt to work with ar- 
rangements of a normal kind, the an- 
swer is that there is a science which, 
by nearly universal acknowledgment, 
must proceed in the same way, — the 
science of ethics. One could scarcely 
maintain that one ought to construct a 
general conception of morality, to be 
obtained by induction, which should 
combine the common factors out of the 
chaos of moral intuitions of different 
times and races. If, however, it be 
asked, what is the characteristic of 



144 The Value of Religious Facts 

morality as the result of the normative 
method, the answer is more clear. The 
conviction that there is a law for willing 
and acting and the acknowledgment of 
its unconditional validity would be the 
mark of moral life. And inner pro- 
cesses which submit to this law become 
moral facts. With the thought of such 
a rule of action, known to us in our 
own inner life, which we acknowledge, 
not to obtain satisfaction of our im- 
pulses and inclinations, but to subject 
our life to a law of obligation, we ven- 
ture into the confusion of the history 
of morals. We cannot expect to find 
this thought clear and distinct in all 
periods of history. It is concealed or 
polluted by thoughts of other laws, by 
threats of punishment, by custom, by 
loss of social popularity. And the 
feelings which accompany the thought 
of the law, guilt, shame, remorse, ex- 



The Values and the Standard 145 

altation, are rarely found unmixed with 
other feelings. 

But the moral thought does free itself 
from the competing thoughts, and the 
moral feelings do conflict with hostile 
feelings; and whenever we find volun- 
tary subjection to a law loftier than 
mere balancing of pleasures, we may 
speak of morality. Whenever this is 
the case, a scale of historical morals may 
be made. 

If this method be applied to re- 
ligions, or rather to a particular religion 
as normal, must not all the character- 
istics of that religious life be included 
in the conception of the norm ? Would 
it not otherwise be emptied or crippled ? 
Would not the thought of the normal 
religion become lost in indeflniteness ? 
Would not one, after all, be forced to 
return to an induction of different re- 
ligious beliefs ? 



146 The Value of Religious Facts 

This latter, certainly, would not be 
a successful method in the comparison 
of morals. If we assume that Christian 
or Greek morality is that which we have 
made our own ideal, one would not de- 
scribe details. Rather one limits one's 
self to a few characteristics, or even to 
one which gives it its distinction over 
other systems. And this might be 
found by an analysis of our conception 
of the normal moral life, an analysis 
which should contrast it as sharply as 
possible with other activities of our own 
inner life. If a single definite thought 
indicates the peculiar nature of what is 
moral, all we have to do is to fix this 
clearly and describe its meaning within 
our own life. It is enough to know 
that there is the thought of a law which 
is higher than impulse, and to show that 
our personal feelings of obligation con- 
nect themselves with this law. 



The Values and the Standard 147 

Just so it would be with the religious 
life. We analyze what is present to us 
when we experience, ourselves or hypo- 
thetically, what is to our own convic- 
tion, the complete form of religious 
life. By comparison with other activi- 
ties of our own life we try to bring 
clearly to mind characteristics of what 
is passing within us. It is the signifi- 
cance to our own life that we need to 
know. The result would be that one 
idea would separate the inner processes 
which are given us in the highest re- 
ligion from the other processes of our 
inner life. These processes would be 
under the control of one thought of a 
power which can supplement the im- 
perfections of our experience and real- 
ize for us our own highest and most 
personal aims. 

The aim in this method, then, is to 
state in the most concentrated form 



148 The Value of Religious Facts 

how the inner activities of the religious 
life are distinguished from the other 
functions of our life, and thus to bring 
to mind one clear thought which should 
give the key to the particular meaning 
of all those processes. 

With this thought well in hand we 
apply it as a standard, asking, in the 
first place, how, in the normal religion, 
the facts of the religious life are differ- 
ent from, or rather similar to, other 
normative activities. What has the 
religious life in distinction from the 
ethical, the aesthetic, the logical activi- 
ties ? All these different problems 
attack us as soon as a historical re- 
ligion is examined. One asks to what 
extent is the normal formation of 
religious ideas discernible in this re- 
ligion; to what extent is the religion 
separate from theories about the world ; 
is aesthetic emotion severed from re- 



The Values and the Standard 149 

ligious feeling ? With the solution of 
these questions the scale of religions 
begins to build itself up on the basis of 
the one concentrated thought. 

In the second place, within the re- 
ligious process itself, a cluster of pecu- 
liar emotions, voluntary activities, and 
ideas group themselves about the cen- 
tral thought. The analogy of moral 
life shows us the way. The limits of 
morals are clearly defined by the 
thought of a law, the acknowledgment 
of which as our own law raises us 
above the flood of impulses. But the 
task for ethics remains to make clear 
what are the numerous inner processes 
which are under the influence of that 
one thought : the feeling of personal 
dignity, of self-respect, of responsibil- 
ity, of regret and guilt, of conscience 
and moral resolve. 

Likewise in defining the idea which 



150 The Value of Religious Facts 

controls the religious life, a great 
variety of actually or hypothetically 
experienced inner processes which ac- 
company it present themselves: the 
emotions of trust, of reverence, of de- 
votion, of obedience, the conception of 
a divine order of the world. 

A mere description of the peculiar 
religious or moral life which is under 
the influence of the one central 
thought, the description of an actual 
historical situation is very far from 
being the end of such an analysis. 
Any distinct content which could be 
given by perception must be rejected. 
It is the form of inner activity that we 
seek clearly to define. If we were try- 
ing to secure a conception of the inner 
activity which we call knowledge, we 
ignore the different objects of know- 
ledge ; we attempt no description of 
schools, or literature, or of the press. 



The Values and the Standard 151 

We try to make clear by comparison 
of what we ourselves experience, what 
we mean by the activity we call know- 
ledge. We compare different degrees 
of the knowledge, opinion, assent, and 
proof, and the feeling of doubt, uncer- 
tainty, and conviction. We try to 
reproduce the conditions of social psy- 
chology under which knowledge de- 
velops. Thus we discover what we do 
and experience, or what the normal 
scientific thinker does when he accom- 
plishes a mental act guided by a wish 
for truth. 

If we are to understand the moral 
life in its perfection, we should not 
describe the contents of the moral law, 
nor the particular actions commanded 
under certain conditions, nor the con- 
dition of society which we should 
recognize as ideal. Rather we should 
contrast activities under the moral law 



152 The Value of Religious Facts 

with other inner activities. We should 
try- to understand what we do when we 
experience a standard, or an objective 
moral law instead of individual rules or 
motives, or personal aims and the high- 
est good. We should make ourselves 
more aware of the meaning of guilt, 
repentance, and other moral feelings. 
We should investigate the psychical 
processes upon which a moral society 
rests : respect, moral indignation, moral 
self-reliance, moral authority and edu- 
cation. 

Analogously, knowledge of normal 
religious life is secured. Description 
of historical facts, or of all the wealth 
of concrete life with its tasks and in- 
sights into suffering and joy, will not 
lead us to the central fact. One must 
abstract from all objects of reality 
which are perceptible. It is not the 
content but the activity that we need 



The Values and the Standard 153 

to understand. What do we do when 
we think the central religious thought 
of a Power beyond ourselves which 
satisfies our highest needs, and when 
we acknowledge that this thought is 
true ? What do we do when we bring 
into consciousness the activity which 
finds the relation of our most personal 
needs to a causality beyond the experi- 
ence of the senses and submits to Him 
as the completion of our own personal- 
ity and as a supplement to the imper- 
fect order of the world as we now know 
it ? 

Further we should find some light 
upon the other activities which are 
more or less bound up with the con- 
trolling idea: the feeling of self, the 
effort for more life, the arrangement of 
inner values, the judgment of value, 
the belief in a final order of the world. 
Apart from any historical form one 



154 The Value of Religious Facts 

would try to understand the signifi- 
cance of religious trust, of reverence, 
of certainty, of the devotion of self to 
the highest purpose, in their union with 
the idea of God. Religious trust, for 
example, in its Christian form, would 
be the glad certainty of the reality of a 
Power which assures me of the accom- 
plishment of my highest purposes in 
spite of flaws in the order of nature 
beyond the control of my will. 

And, finally, in the highest stages of 
religion the common experiences of a 
religious society dominated by the 
thought of God are to be defined. 
What is a revelation, a religious tradi- 
tion, an authoritative faith ? How is 
faith propagated and how are religious 
customs extended ? 

As a result we should have a highly 
abstract conception of the normal re- 
ligion. The advantages of this abstrac- 



The Values and the Standard 155 

tion over a description of the most 
complete religion in all the fulness of 
living detail would be that the peculiar 
characteristics would be more sharply 
distinguished from other sides of the 
inner life. For all clear definition is 
abstraction. And, furthermore, the 
normative form of the conception 
would be more fit to be used as a 
standard with which other religions 
might be compared. 

Suppose now that the norm is present 
in our minds and we feel its authority, 
ought there to be any place for the 
suspicion that the norm may be some- 
thing visionary or fantastic, a beautiful 
possibility, but unreal and unpractical ? 

The answer is that the norms must 
be accepted upon their own evidence. 
That there should be truth, and right 
and beauty and holiness is absolutely 
beyond any explanation. The fact is 



156 The Value of Religious Facts 

simply accepted. I may trace the his- 
tory of their prevalence among men ; I 
can describe the fact that men do judge 
themselves and others by them ; I may 
treat them as facts of psychology to be 
analyzed into sensational elements. 
But just why these particular psychical 
processes should have authority; why 
these norms ought to be selected to 
have authority over the whole stream 
of consciousness and all the acts of life ; 
why the normal conscience requires 
that certain things should happen 
which are not happening, and rejects 
what is actually occurring, this we can- 
not and need not explain. 

We can say nothing more than state 
the fact that men do feel responsible. 
Is it not folly to ask whether it is right 
to be virtuous, or true that there is 
truth ? As a matter of fact we do 
make ourselves responsible not only 



The Values and the Standard 157 

for will and deed, but for thought and 
feeling. And a complete man re- 
proaches himself for errors of thought 
and offences against good taste, not 
less than for moral laxity. He recog- 
nizes duties for his thinking and his 
emotional life as well as for moral life, 
and he is ashamed and pained when he 
violates any of the norms. He ac- 
knowledges a law to which he is sub- 
ject and he knows that the worth of his 
deeds depends upon the fulfilment of 
that law. The obligation to conform 
to the laws of logic, if one wants truth, 
is the most generally recognized of the 
norms ; the moral obligation, if not so 
universally acknowledged, is usually 
more intensely experienced, to the 
point even where transgressions are 
punished by death. 

These " laws " which we find in our 
logical, aesthetic, and moral conscience 



158 The Value of Religious Facts 

offer no explanations of facts and are 
not themselves explained. They assert 
how facts must be that we may approve 
them as right, true, and beautiful. 
They are not laws stating observed 
sequences of events, but standards or 
ideals according to which the worth of 
what happens in causal connection is 
judged. 

The religious norm insists that our 
present experience is supplemented by 
a higher experience. The obligation 
passes beyond our present limits. Our 
ideals, our norms, our highest values 
are for it not merely abstractedly pos- 
sible fulfilments of our present selves, 
but facts of the very highest reality, 
facts also to a normal experience of an 
individual who selects for himself an 
experience which fulfils his own plan. 

Our relation to God is the most real 
relation of all, a continual expression 



The Values and the Standard 159 

of thanks and delight. He is the only 
One whom we wish permanently to 
imitate. This imitation is the religious 
norm. It is the deepest part of us, far 
below philosophy and custom. 

It is the half-conscious impulse which 
becomes a practical and verifiable cer- 
tainty that our highest ideals may be 
attained, that the highest possible 
claims upon nature, upon society, and 
upon ourselves are, after all, in some 
mysterious way, required of us, and 
that these ideals and these claims are 
laid out upon an infinitely vast scale, 
in which our own experience and the 
experience of mankind about us now 
is a provisional and rudimentary step. 

This norm, then, is a standard for 
our judgment when we wish to supple- 
ment our own experience, or the col- 
lective experience of our fellow-men in 
a universal form. In proportion as we 



160 The Value of Religious Facts 

feel keenly the clash of ideals and the 
lack of things which ought not to be 
left out, in proportion as our dissatis- 
faction with ourselves as we are be- 
comes genuine, and the egotism of our 
highest self becomes intense, in propor- 
tion as our claim for more significance 
for human lives becomes firm, we shall 
know that a Power which is eternal is 
calling forth in us that which revolts 
against a dull and languid life with 
small hopes and small demands upon 
life. We shall then be capable of 
hatred for the flaws of life, and of 
exultation in God. 

When once the norm is constantly 
in our thought, then the knowledge of 
the different kinds of beliefs given us 
in history doubles in value, both for 
intensifying our insight into the norm 
and into the inner life of historic re- 
ligions. One's own experience of the 



The Values and the Standard 161 

highest is the point of departure. 
What is lower in one's own real or 
hypothetical life is classed with regard 
to the highest form known ; an inverse 
classification would not give such clear 
or accurate results. 

It has been a common prejudice of 
scientifically trained minds that our self 
in reflection upon its own real or sup- 
posed experience, when bringing a 
mass of concrete details into conscious- 
ness, can empty itself of all personal 
feelings and purposes and remain, by a 
slight strain of attention upon the 
given contents, a purely reflective 
activity. 

This opinion has given place to the 
reflection that the self, when it con- 
siders its own states, past, present, or 
hypothetical, is still a living self. Its 
point of view must be from the midst 
of a complicated state of individual 



1 62 The Value of Religious Facts 

attitudes. This is most clearly true in 
cases wherein we reflect upon past in- 
cidents in our own life, it may be, 
upon some despondent mood of an- 
other period. At that time, when we 
were in the experience, certain mo- 
tives and insistent feelings were im- 
mediately present. But when we now 
recollect, we discover that there were 
other grounds for our melancholy, 
grounds of which we then were scarcely 
aware. How can this be ? Not be- 
cause we now, with more concentrated 
attention, have discovered the true 
grounds of our sad state, but because 
our self now comprises a new content 
of ideas, emotions, and purposes. 
Either a content of consciousness which 
we formerly had may have been re- 
covered after loss, or an entirely new 
content may have been assimilated 
under new condition or with a new con- 



The Values and the Standard 163 

trol of our life. In some such way the 
self has won a new position for analyz- 
ing the past event. By comparing the 
new content with that which, by hypo- 
thetical experience, we have recalled 
from the past, we discover reasons for 
the mood which in immediate experi- 
ence altogether escaped us. Not only 
our personal life has changed, but we 
have passed through new experiences 
which fit us to reproduce in ourselves 
by imitation experiences of others 
which would have been before incom- 
prehensible, fit us to understand others 
as well as ourselves. 

Just this same method we apply to 
research into remote forms of religious 
life. One analyzes the forms of re- 
ligion which one acknowledges as the 
complete form either in one's own life 
or in some other experience, in order 
to discover the standard. 



164 The Value of Religious Facts 

The hypothetical living into the sit- 
uations of other men gives new points 
of insight into the complete experience. 
And from this point of view one brings 
to one's mind more clearly the distinc- 
tions between the religious and other 
similar activities of the inner life. 

Acquaintance, then, with different 
historical forms of religious life is re- 
quired in order to make firm one's 
grasp upon the standard and for the 
constant expansion of one's own re- 
ligious life, not in order to accumulate 
material for large generalizations, but 
that one may allow one's self to go on 
to new points of insight into other lives 
and into the depths of one's own 
normative life. 

In this way one seeks for the secret 
of another's life and one finds a part of 
one's own life, and one finds the secret 
of one's own life, and it is the part of 



The Values of the Standard 165 

the life of another which has long been 
sought. 

In such cases what is sought is a part 
of what one has already found, and 
both link us to God, who is revealing 
Himself to us, and us to each other, 
and what is best in us to our own 
selves. 

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